Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories (31 page)

SPOKESMAN: But what people called Fordism, or at least your more popular ideas about society—stable jobs, safe salaries, a certain level of affluence—generated new aspirations in the workers’ minds. Were you aware of that, Mr Ford? Out of a shapeless, unstable mass, you helped to create a workforce with something to defend, a workforce with dignity and with an awareness of its own value, and hence a group that demanded security, guarantees, contractual power, the right to decide its own destiny. It was what they call an irreversible process, that your paternalism could no longer either contain or control…

HENRY FORD: I always look to the future, but in order to simplify things, not complicate them. Yet all those engaged in planning the future, proposing reforms, seem to want nothing better than to complicate things over and over. They’re all the same: reformers, theorists, politicians, even presidents: Wilson, Roosevelt… Again and again I found myself fighting a lone battle against a pointlessly complicated world: politics, finance, wars…

SPOKESMAN: You’re not going to deny that wars brought certain advantages to your business…

HENRY FORD: Those advantages weren’t part of my plans. I’ve always been a pacifist, no one can ever deny that. I was always against American intervention, in the First World War and in the Second. In 1915 I organized the Peace Ship, I crossed the Atlantic to Norway together with influential people from the Church, the universities and the newspapers to ask the European powers to break off hostilities. They didn’t listen to me. Then my own country joined the war too. Even the Ford Company started working for the war. So I announced that I wouldn’t touch a cent of the profits on war contracts.

SPOKESMAN: You promised to return those profits to the State, but it doesn’t seem you ever did that…

HENRY FORD: After the war I had to face an extremely critical financial situation. The banks…

SPOKESMAN: The banks were always another of your
bêtes noires
…

HENRY FORD: The financial system is another pointless complication which hinders manufacturing rather than helping it. As I see it money should always come after work, as the result of work, not before. As long as I steered clear of the financial markets everything went well: I came through the Crash of 1929 because my shares weren’t quoted on the stock exchange. My goal in my work is simplicity…

SPOKESMAN: But you played a very important role in setting up this economic system you say you don’t approve of. Don’t you think that rather than being inspired by simplicity, your considerations are somewhat simplistic?

HENRY FORD: When it comes to business I always relied on simple American ideas. Wall Street is another world to me… a foreign world… oriental…

SPOKESMAN: Just a minute, Mr Ford… No doubt you have every reason to be annoyed with Wall Street… That’s one thing, but to identify the financial world and all your enemies with people of a particular origin, a particular religion… to write anti-Semitic articles in your papers… to collect them in a book… to support that fanatic who was soon to seize power in Germany, these…

HENRY FORD: My ideas were misunderstood… I had nothing to do with the obscenities that were to happen in Europe… I was speaking for the good of America and for their good too, these people who are different from us, and who, if they wanted to take part in our community, should have appreciated what the real American principles were… those principles I am proud to have run my company on.

SPOKESMAN: You achieved an enormous amount in the area of manufacturing, Mr Ford… And you theorized a great deal too… But while things always behaved as you forecast and planned, men didn’t, there was always something in the human being that escaped you, that fell short of your expectations… Is that right?

HENRY FORD: My ambition wasn’t just to make things. Iron, laminates, steel, they’re not enough. Things aren’t an end in themselves. What I was thinking of was a model of humanity. I didn’t just manufacture goods. I wanted to manufacture men!

SPOKESMAN: Could you explain a bit more clearly what you mean by that, Mr Ford? May I sit down? Could I light a cigarette? Would you like one?

HENRY FORD: Nooooo! You can’t smoke here! Cigarettes are a vice and an aberration! Cigarettes are prohibited in Ford factories! I dedicated years of energy to the anti-smoking campaign! Even Edison said I was right!

SPOKESMAN: But Edison smoked!

HENRY FORD: Only cigars. I can forgive a cigar or two. Likewise a pipe. They are part of the American tradition. But not cigarettes! Statistics show that the worst criminals are cigarette smokers. Cigarettes lead straight to the gutter! I published a book against cigarettes!

SPOKESMAN: Don’t you think that, as well as cigarettes, you might also have concerned yourself with the effects of rhythms of work on health? Or of the pollution your factories generate? Or of the stench of the exhaust emissions your cars produce!

HENRY FORD: My factories are always clean, well-lit and well-ventilated. And I can demonstrate that when it came to hygiene no one took as much care as I did. But now I’m talking about the moral aspect, the mind. For my plan I needed sober, hard-working, good-living men, with happy family lives, with clean and orderly homes!

SPOKESMAN: Is that why you set up a group of inspectors to enquire into the private lives of your employees? To stick their noses into the love affairs and sex lives of other men and women?

HENRY FORD: An employee who lives in an appropriate way will work in an appropriate way. I chose my personnel on the basis not just of their performance at work, but their morality at home too. And if I preferred to employ married men, good fathers and home-makers rather than libertines, drunkards and gamblers, there were reasons of efficiency for doing so. As far as women are concerned, I am happy to give them factory employment if they have to support their children, but if they have a husband in work then their place is in the home!

SPOKESMAN: Yet your first opponents were the pious puritans who fought against the spread of the motor car because they saw it as a danger to the family! Preachers and moralists thundered against it as something lovers could use to meet far from their parents’ watchful eyes; something that encouraged families to gad about on Sundays instead of going to church; something people would mortgage their houses and dig into their sacred savings to buy; they said the car prompted an otherwise thrifty people to desire long trips and vacations; the car generated envy amongst the poor and stirred up revolutions…

HENRY FORD: The reactionaries are like the Bolsheviks: they can’t see reality, they don’t know what people need for the elementary functions of human life. I always acted in line with an idea too, I had my model. But my ideas are always applicable.

SPOKESMAN: Of course, the Bolsheviks… What do you think of the fact that right from the beginning Soviet communism took Fordism as its model? Lenin and Stalin admired your organization of production and to a certain extent became disciples of your theories. They too wanted the whole of society to organize itself along the lines of industrial productivity, they too wanted to have their factories and workers operate as in Detroit, they too wanted to produce a disciplined and puritanical workforce…

HENRY FORD: But they were unable to give their workers what I gave mine. Their austerity, like that of the reactionaries, prolonged shortages; my austerity brought abundance. But I’m not interested in what they did: my idea was an American idea, developed in relation to America, animated by the spirit of pioneers who weren’t afraid of hard work and were able to adapt to the new, who were frugal and austere but wanted to enjoy the things of this world…

SPOKESMAN: But the America of the pioneers is gone. Wiped out by Henry Ford’s Detroit…

HENRY FORD: I come from that old America. My father had a farm, in Michigan. I began to experiment with my inventions on the farm, financed by my father; I wanted to build practical transport vehicles for agriculture. The car was born in the country. I kept my love for the America of my childhood and my parents. As soon as I realized it was disappearing, I started buying and collecting old farm tools, ploughs, millwheels, carriages, buggies, sleds, furniture from the old wooden houses that were going to ruin…

SPOKESMAN: So, just as ecology originates in the culture that produced pollution, so antique dealing originates from the same culture that imposed the new things that have replaced the old…

HENRY FORD: I bought a traditional old tavern in Sudbury, Massachusetts, together with its swing sign and veranda… I even had them rebuild the unsurfaced track the wagon trails used when they headed West…

SPOKESMAN: Is it true that in order to bring back the atmosphere of the time of horses and stagecoaches around that old tavern, you had the highway diverted, the very highway your Ford cars were roaring along at top speed?

HENRY FORD: There’s room for everything in this America of ours, don’t you think? The American countryside mustn’t be allowed to disappear. I was always opposed to the exodus of farmers from the country. I designed a hydroelectric station on the Tennessee to supply low cost energy to farmers. I would have given them electrical appliances, fertilizers, and they would have stayed away from the city. But neither government nor farmers would hear of it. They never understand simple ideas: there are three elementary functions in human life: farming, manufacturing and transportation. Every problem hangs on the way we grow things, the way we produce things, the way we transport things, and I always proposed the simplest solutions. The farmers’ work was pointlessly complicated. Only five per cent of their energy was being spent to good use.

SPOKESMAN: So you don’t feel nostalgic for that life?

HENRY FORD: If you think I miss things from the past, then you haven’t understood me at all. I don’t care one bit about the past! I don’t believe in the experience of history! Really, filling people’s heads with culture from the past is the most pointless thing you can do.

SPOKESMAN: But the past means experience… In the life of peoples and individuals…

HENRY FORD: Even individual experience serves no other purpose than to perpetuate memories of failures. The ‘experts’ in the factory only know how to tell you that you can’t do this, that that has already been tried but doesn’t work… If I had listened to the experts, I would never have achieved any of what I did achieve, I would have been daunted from day one, I would never have managed to put together an internal combustion engine. At the time the experts thought electricity was the solution to everything, that engines should be electric too. They were all fascinated by Edison, rightly so, and so was I. And I went to ask him if he thought I was crazy, as people were saying, because I’d set my stubborn mind to getting an engine rolling that went ‘brum brum’. Then, the man himself, Edison, the great Edison, said to me: ‘Young man, I’ll tell you what I think. I’ve worked with electricity all my life. Well, electrical cars will never be able to range very far from their supply stations. No good imagining they can carry batteries of accumulators around with them: they’re too heavy. And steam cars aren’t ideal either: they’ll always need a boiler and fire and what it takes to fuel it. But the automobile you’ve found is self-sufficient: no fire, no boiler, no smoke, no steam; it carries its power house around with it. That’s what we were waiting for, young man. You’re on the right track! Keep at it, don’t lose heart! If you manage to invent a lightweight engine that fuels itself, without the need to charge itself up like a battery, you’ll have a great future!’

That’s what the great Edison said to me. The king of electricity was the only one who realized that I was doing something electricity could never do. No, being an expert doesn’t count, what you’ve done doesn’t count. It’s what you can do and what you want to do that counts! The ideas you have for the future!

SPOKESMAN: Today your future is already the past… and it conditions the present for everyone… Tell me, when you look around today, do you see the future you wanted? I mean the future you saw when you started, when you were a young country boy in Michigan, shutting yourself away in your father’s farm shed, trying out different cylinders and pistons and transmission belts and differential gears… Tell me, Mr Ford, do you remember what you wanted then?

HENRY FORD: Yes, I wanted lightness, a light engine for a light vehicle, like the small gig I kept trying to fix up with a steam boiler… I’ve always looked for lightness, reducing the waste of materials and effort… I spent my days shut up in the garage workshop… From outside I caught the smell of hay… the whistle of the thrush from the old elm near the pond… a butterfly came in through the window, drawn to the glow of the boiler, it beat its wings around it, then the thump of the piston sent it flying away, silent, light…

(Images of slow heavy traffic in a big city, of trucks in a jam on the highway, of work at a steel mill press, work at an assembly line, of smoke from smoke stacks, etc., are superimposed over the figure of Henry Ford as he speaks these last lines.)

My thumb presses down independently of any act of will: moment by moment, but at irregular intervals, I feel the need to push, to press, to set off an impulse sudden as a bullet; if this is what they meant when they granted me partial insanity, they were right. But they are wrong if they imagine there was no plan, no clearly thought-out intention behind what I did. Only now, in the padded and enamelled calm of this small hospital room, can I deny the incongruous behaviour I had to hear attributed to me at the trial, as much by the defence as the prosecution. With this report which I hope to send to the appeal court magistrates, though my defence lawyers are absolutely determined to prevent me, I intend to re-establish the truth, the only truth, my own, if anyone is capable of understanding it.

The doctors are in the dark too, groping about, but at least they were positive about my desire to write something down and gave me this typewriter and this ream of paper: they think this development indicates an improvement due to my being shut up in a room without a television and they attribute the disappearance of the spasm that used to contract my hand to my being deprived of the small object I was holding when I was arrested and that I managed (the convulsions I threatened every time they grabbed it from me were not simulated) to keep with me throughout my detention, interrogation and trial. (How, if not by demonstrating that the
corpus delicti
had become a part of my
corpus
, could I have explained what I had done and—though I didn’t manage to convince them—why I had done it?)