And he saw in America a great machine, made up of countless human parts—a machine which should work evenly, efficiently, harmoniously, for the production and just distribution of food, shelter, clothes, all the necessities of a simple and comfortable life.
His part, as he saw it, was to make and distribute automobiles. He meant to do his part in the best way he knew how, hoping by his success to hasten the time when every one would follow his example, and all the terrible friction and waste of our present system would be stopped.
This was his only interest in life. A farmer-boy mechanic, who had left school at sixteen, who had lived all his life among machines, interested in practical things, he saw no value in anything which did not promote the material well-being of the people. Art—music, painting, literature, architecture—luxuries, super-refinements of living, these things seemed useless to him.
“Education? Come to Detroit and I’ll show you the biggest school in the world,” he says. “Every man there is learning and going ahead all the time. They’re realizing that their interests are the same as their employer’s, that he is the men’s trustee, that he is only one of the workmen with a job of his own, and that his job, like the jobs of the others, has to be run for the good of the whole plant. He would fire a man who took away from the other men for his own advantage. That spirit would harm the works. Similarly, the men would have a right to fire him if he took away from them for his personal benefit.
“The men in my plant are learning these things. They’re leading the way for the workers of this country. They are going to show other workers, just as I hope to show other employers, that things should be run for the most good for the most people. That’s the education we need.
“This education outside of industry that we have to-day is just the perpetuation of tradition and convention. It’s a good deal of a joke and a good deal of waste motion. To my mind, the usefulness of a school ends when it has taught a man to read and write and figure, and has brought out his capacity for being interested in his line. After that, let the man or boy get after what he is interested in, and get after it with all his might, and keep going ahead—that is school.
“If those young fellows who are learning chemistry in colleges were enough interested in chemistry they would learn it the way I did, in my little back shed of nights. I would not give a plugged nickel for all the higher education and all the art in the world.”
This, then, was Henry Ford at 52. A slender, slightly stooped man, with hollow cheeks, thin, firm, humorous lips, gray hair; a man with sixty odd millions of dollars; used to hard work all his life, and liking it. A man who on a single idea had built up a tremendous organization, so systematized that it ran by itself, requiring little supervision.
In some way he must use his driving energy, in some way he must spend his millions, and his nature demanded that he do it along the line of that idea which had dominated his whole life—the machine idea of humanity, the idea of the greatest good to the greatest number.
That summer, for the first time, he found himself with leisure. He was not imperatively needed at the plant. He and Mrs. Ford spent some time in Greenfield, where he enlarged the old farm by purchasing nearly four thousand acres of land adjoining it. He himself spent some time on the problems of organizing the work on those acres. He and his wife lived in the house where they had begun their married life, and where, with their old furniture and their old friends, they reconstructed the life of thirty years before.