the wild wheel - garrett

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THE WILD WHEEL

( fact Q am tt

P A N T H E O N B O O K S , N E W Y O R K


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Copyright 1952 by Pa ntheon Boohs Inc.Sixth Avenue, New York lJf, N. Y.

First PrintingFebruary, 1952

The author and publishers express herewith theirthanks to the Free Library, Philadelphia (Automo-tive Collection), the Ford Motor Company, Dearbornand New York, and Wide World Photos Inc., NewYork, for kind permission to reproduce photographsfrom their collections.

M A N U F A C T U R E D I N T H E U N I T E D S T A T E SB Y K I N G S P O R T P R E S S , I N C . , K I N G S P O R T , T E N N E S S E E

D E S I G N E D B Y A N D O R B R A U N


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CONTENTS

FOREWORD 7i SWEAT IN PARA DISE 911 SEED S OF TH E MONKEY WREN CH 45i n GE NE SIS AND EVOLUTION 56iv TH E MAD WAY 81v TH E MAGIC LEVER 102v i TH E INNOCE NT MIND 128V I I IN TH E GLARE 155V I I I T H E BROKEN SONG 170ix GE NIU S IGNORAMUS 183x HISTO RY 'S REVEN GE 193

ENVOY 216


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FOREWORD

L A I S S E Z F A I R E was a religion that grewto full size in the American environment and never any-where else. It was founded on the doctrine of AdamSmith's unseen hand, the mysterious power of whichwas to bring it to pass th a t the individual, freely pu rsu -ing his own selfish ends, was nevertheless bound to servethe common good, whether he consciously intended todo so or not, or ever thought about it at all. It wascruel in the way that nature is cruel to weak and mar-ginal things; but it worked. How and why naturally itproduced here the most fabulous material achievementin the history of the human race is the subject of manyheavy and quarrelsome books in the library of socialand economic theory. The idea of this book is to makeyou see it working through the eyes of its darling prac-tician.

If in this country, for both good and evil, free pri-vate enterprise had its logical manifestations in a pro-digious manner, so Henry Ford was its extreme andlast pure event. After him it was different. The religion7


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THE WILD WHEELdeclined. It no longer exists in the orthodox form any-where.

But this is not ahistory of Ford and his times, nora biography either, furnished with notes, conclusionsand a philosophy of meaning. Rather, itis a structureof episode, word and deed, like adwelling, and the manis therea kind of divine mechanic, the ultimate childof his era, acting upon his world with ruthless and ter-rible energy, by instinct and intuition, who thoughtwith his hands. As you watch him coming in and goingout you may not understand him. Indeed, it is veryprobable that he did not understand himself. But youwill perhaps get some feeling of life and its lusty trans-actions under the creed of Laissez Faire, and therebyarrive at a judgment of your own concerning what wehave left behind.

G. G.

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O N E

SWEAT IN PARADISE

i T W A S Sunday. W e were making u p theforms of "The Annalist" in the composing room of theNew York Times when Mr. Ochs appeared, threadinghis way toward us between the turtles. His arms wereheld a little ou t, as if he were bearin g a load on his chest,and his eyes were wide and staring. By these signs weknew his mind was buzzing. W hen he spoke it was ha rd lyabove a whisper, saying:

"He's crazy, isn't he? Don't you think he has gonecrazy?"

W e knew what he mean t. Th e news was in the morningpaper that the Ford Motor Company had announced aminimum wage of five dollars aday for all employeesdown to the floor sweepers; the day's work at the sametime was cut from nine to eight hours.

The year was 1914. Only those then living at an ageof awareness can believe what a sensation that an-nouncement made, not here only but all over the world.Until then the Ford Motor Company had been payingthe prevailing wage, which was a little over two dollarsa day.9


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THE WILD WHEELAm erican indu stry was rocked to its heels. F our kinds

of ruin were commonly prophesied. First, Detroit wouldbe ruined by an exodus of employers; second, those whoremained and tried to meet the Ford wage scale wouldgo bankrupt; third, the Ford Motor Company itselfwould fall; fourth, the Ford employees would be de-moralized by this sudden affluence; they wouldn't knowhow to spend the money.

I said to Mr. Ochs: "It might be well to have a look.I'll go out and see."

The barber who shaved me the next morning at theBook-Cadillac in Detroit said: "Our Mr. Ford has gonecrazy. Did you know?"

At breakfast four men came to my table to confirmthe barber's opinion. They were employers of labor. Iasked them if they were going to leave D etro it, and theysaid they were. Ford could have it.

Meanwhile an event of inverted cruelty was buildingitself on the Ford hiring lot. W hen the thing happened,the b itte r people of D etroit made the most of it. In near-zero weather, from before dawn un til da rk , thousands ofwistful men were milling about in front of the employ-ment office, which ofcourse was swamped. They camefrom everywhere. It was tidal migration, rising in thehills and valleys and in other cities, like agold rushfrom the two-dollar day to the five-dollar day. Wordwent forth that only a few more workers were neededand these would be found in D etroi t. T h a t had no effectat all. Every incoming freight train brought more of

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SWEAT IN PARADISEthem, shivering in empty freight cars or clinging to thebumpers, with the light of a five-dollar job in their eyes.No matter how it got there, amotley of ten thousanddisappointed and wretched men, standing on the coldside of the door to awage earner's heaven, would be-come restive and a little ugly. It obstructed traffic andrefused to disperse. Then the police were called in; andwhat was perhaps the most innocent mob that had everassembled itself anywhere was scattered by icy streamsfrom the fire hose.

The plant was then at Highland Park. River Rougecame later.

I spent the nex t two days with F ord . He made it seemquite simple. He said: "If the floor sweeper's heart is inhis job he can save us five dollars a day by picking upsmall tools instead of sweeping them out."

Years later he wrote:"Unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep

wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for other-wise it limits the number of its customers. One's ownemployees ought to be one's own best customers. Thereal prog ress of o ur company dates from 1914, when weraised the minimum wage from somewhat more than twodollars to a flat five dollars a day , for then we increasedthe buying power of our own people, and they increasedthe buying power of other people, and so on and on. Itis this thought of enlarging buying power by payinghigh wages and selling at low prices that is behind theprosperity of this country."1 1


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THE WILD WHEELThat was in his book Today and Tomorrow,* which

he did in collaboration with Samuel Crowther in 1926.The complete theory had by that time arrivedthetheory, namely, th at the wage earner is more im po rtan tas a consumer than as a producer. How much of t ha tformulation was Ford's and how much of it Crowther'sone cannot say . They wro te several books toge ther, w ithFord speaking in the first person as I or we, and theideas were entirely his own, but as he conceived themthey were wordless revelations or sudden flashes of in-sight. It was Crow ther's p a r t to clothe them with reasonand argument and house them inproper premises.

Ford knew something about the behavior of his ownmind. He would say: "We go forward without thefacts ." Or: "We learn the facts as we go along."T o which Crowther would add some rhe torica l p hrase son vision for the pioneer and facts for the plodder.

I once asked Ford where ideas came from. Did hebeat them out of his head or stare them out of a blankwall?

There was something like a saucer on the desk infront of him. He flipped it upside down and kept tap-ping the bottom with his fingers as he said: "You knowatmospheric pressure is hitting there at fourteen poundsper square inch. You can't see it and you can't feel it.Yet you know it is happening. It 's that way with ideas.The air is full of them. They are knocking you on the

* Today and Tomorrow, by Henry Ford. Copyright 1926 byDoubleday & Co., Inc.12


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SWEAT IN PARADISEhead. You don't have to think about it too much. Youonly have to know what you want. Just suspend in yourmind the tho ught of what it is you want. If you do th a t,then you can forget it. You can go about your businessthinking and talking of other things, and suddenly theidea you want will come through. It was there all thetime."

Then one day I saw it work. Iwas in Cameron's officewhen Ford came in unexpectedly, just looking around."You," he said to me, sitting down and putting his feeton the desk, "are just the man I want to see. You areone person I think of who can make this subject ofmoney clear to everybody."

It happened at that time that money was his obses-sional diversion. He had but recently induced his bosomfriend Thomas A. Edison to invent a new kind of money ;the Edison plan, already published, had turned out tobe one of the quaint additions to the queer side of mone-tary literature. Even Ford seemed to know that.

I said: "The trouble is, Mr. Ford, I've learned that Idon't know anything about money.""Good!" he said. "That 's why you can do it . Thepeople who write on money all begin with knowing toomuch about it."

With that he was off in his most voluble manner.What was money? It was holy water. Here was thelargest automobile company in the world. Did moneydo it? Money had nothing to do with it. Here he was,supposed to be one of the very rich men in the world.13


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THE WILD WHEELBut look (turning his pockets inside out). He had nomoney. Yet of course money was necessary as a sign.The use of it was to enable people to exchange things ofvalue. But it ought to be that simple. The bankers hadso bitched it up, with their speculations and manipula-tions, that now nobody could understand it. If only

And so the monologue went for more than an hour.Cameron wearily looked at the clock and said it wastime for lunch. Ford led the way; as we were goingthrough the door Cameron held back a little and mut-tered to me: "Do you wonder how so much chaff cancome out of what you know to be really a fine mill ?"

At the lunch table Ford went on, not from where hehad been interrupted but from anew beginning, untilthe soup was served. Then suddenly his tall body stiff-ened; the expression of his face, which had been verylively, changed to that a sleepwalker, and he said to noone in part icularto himself, really: "A-h-h! I 'm notthinking about that at all." With no other word he roseabruptly, kicked back his chair and walked rapidlyaway. An idea that he had been wanting had comethrough and he was gone to do something about it.

Cameron said: "That happens often. He won't beback. We may not see him again for a week."

2T H E facts t h a t "came afterw ard " from the five-dollarday were startling, some in kind and some in degree.That the buying power of the Ford wage earner alone

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SWEAT IN PARADISEwas increased had in itself no social meaningnotthen, not until ahigh-wage policy began to make itselffelt as an example throughout American industry. Butthe immediate effect upon the individual was electric,and th is was an effect produced no t by five dollars a da yin his pocket but by the contrast between the Ford wageand awage anywhere else. That was what determinedthe man's atti tude toward his job.During that first visit with Ford we spent most oftwo days in the plant. That was where he loved to be.He hated the office and was uneasy there. The spectacleof work excited his mind.

I had learned to know the sounds of industry, par-ticularly the difference between the rhythm of apiece-work shop and that of a time-pay shop. The music ofmanufacture has in each case a certain tempo, and asit crashes on your ear you will remember, ifyou happento know it, the chant of the old flax breakers

B-y . . . t-h-e . . . d-a-y . . . B-y . . . t-h-e. . . d-a-y . . . B-y . . . t-h-e . . . d-a-y.Bythepiece-Bythepiece-Bythepiece.W ell, here itwas all by the day, and yet never had I

heard a rhythm so fast in apiece-work shop.At that t ime a great deal ofmaterial was moved in

dolly bins trundled by hand along the floor. A man atthe top of a long aisle would start toward us with hisbin and come so fast that he couldn't stop short if hewanted to, but he didn't want to stop or slow down andit was Ford who had to leap aside to let him pass. And15


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THE WILD WHEELthat was all you had to see. The labor cost of producingan automobile was falling before your eyes becauseevery worker in the place was like the man with thedolly bin. Five yea rs l ate r, when the minimum wage hadbeen increased to six dollars a day, Ford said:

"T he paym ent of five dollars a day for an eight-hourday was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we evermade, and the six-dollar-a-day wage is cheaper than thefive. How far this will go we do not know."

The next rise, to seven dollars a day, occurred in1929, after the great stock market crash, when every-body else was thinking of how to cut wages. This wasFord's dramatic contribution to the hope of immediaterecovery; and unhappily it had very little effect. It didnot even increase the buying power of Ford workers,because almost immediately the Ford plant had to goon short time.

Two years later, when the whole country was in theslough of despond, I found Ford playing around withhis supreme hobby, which was Greenfield Village, as ifhe had nothing else on his mind.I said to Cameron: "He thought he had the answerto depression. Now how does he take it?"

Cameron said: "I don't know. He doesn't talk aboutit much. It 's so terrible th a t I believe he doesn 't dare lethimself think about it."

F o r aman who normally had hair-trigger opinionson any subject under the sun, his silence at this time16


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SWEAT IN PARADISEwas notable. The reflections to which he gave any ex-pression a t all, pr iva tely or pub licly, were either puerileor grotesquely inadequate. Several times he said it wasprobably ablessing. Everything that people were say-ing about it was wrong. He was sure of this becausepeople were always wrong. But that was as far as hecould get.

It was a chasm that his mind apparently could notbridge. For years he had been saying: "We need haveno slumps in business. We need never have unemploy-ment. Our recipe for hard times is to lower prices andincrease wages. And itwould take the efforts ofonly afew large companies thus to check the panic of any de-pression."

Business, indeed, might have its ups and downs, butthey were unimportant because"We have attained such speed that slowing down for

economic crossings or curves does not mean anything.W hen the limited pass ing th rou gh crowded sections cutsdown from sixty tothirty miles an hour, it does notmean the tr a in is going to sto p or even slump. But thosewho are fearful are always looking out for signs of aslump. Often itwould seem that neurasthenics managebusiness."

And he knew what caused the slowings down. Busi-ness Was continually putting the profit motive over whathe called the wage motive. When business thought onlyof profit for the owners "instead of providing goods for17


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THE WILD WHEELall," then it frequently broke downso frequently thatscientists had invented what they called "business cy-cles."

But in those simple terms you could not explain theGreat Depression, and even if you thought you could,what good would it do? Merely to increase wages wasnot the answer. At the onset of the depression he hadtried that, with no result whatever.

Moreover, from the first five-dollar day, which washis famous example, there had been a bonanza effectan effect upon the worker's productivity and thereforeupon labor coststhat could not repeat itself. Remem-ber, it was not the five-dollar wage that produced thateffect; it was the doubling of wages th a t did it . As o therautomobile manufacturers followed his example andado pted his methods, five dollars a day became the pre-vailing wage in Detroit and the special incentive of theFord wage was lost. Could he double wages againtoten dollars? If so, could he double them aga in to twen tydollars? The productivity of labor could not be in-creased that fast. The method of increasing it in amarvelous manner, by bringing the work to the man onan assembly line and breaking each man's task down toa few repetitive reflex motionsthat method had beendiscovered once for all. It could no more be discoveredagain than a gold deposit. It could only be workedharder, perhaps against the law of diminishing returns.In any case, there was no magic in the Ford wage assuch; the magic was what he got for the wage he paid.

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SWEAT IN PARADISEAnd so itwas that Ford, who discovered familiar

things with the innocence of first-seeing, discovered th a tthe m at te r of wages was a very complex m att er indeed;and the more he tho ug ht about it the more grim he was.

H E R E the threads of irony begin to appear in theweave. By example and precept and with the authorityof success, one man had caused a revolutionary changeto begin in ways of thinking about wages and profitsand what business was for. On that account both laborand industry owed him an immense debt and both paidit in bad coin. He came to be hated by labor, whichfound his discipline too hard; and industry could neverforgive him for what he did to its complacency.In the end he was defeated. A new time came. NowFord workers smoke at their tasks as workers do every-where else, their unions tell the management how fastthey will work and for what wages, and the F or d M oto rCompany prices its cars as all other automobile makersdo. All this he lived to see.About midway ofhis experience with a high-wagepolicy, the minimum by that time having reached sixdollars aday, Ford came to this reflection:

"We don't know what the right wage is and perhapswe shall never know. The world has never approachedindustry with the wage motivefrom the angle of see-ing how high wages may beand until it has we shallnot know much about wages."19


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THE WILD WHEELThen he tried this definition:"The right price is not what the traffic will bear. Theright wage is not the lowest sum aman will work for.

The right price is the lowest price an article can stead-ily be sold for. The right wage is the highest wage theemployer can steadily pay."

Perfect perhaps as a generalization; and yet it leavesunaccounted for so many variables and so many ele-ments of guess, judgment and hazard that it can hardlybe taken as aworking rule whereby wages may be de-termined. For example, what of the profit that comesfrom better method and engineering, more intense tech-nology, better tools put into the hands of the worker?To whom does that belong? How shall it be divided?Ford said:"It is not long since the emphasis in industry was onprofit for th e owner. The em phasis now is on profit forthe wage earner. The narrow cap italist and the narrowtra de unionist have exactly the same po int of view. Th eydiffer only on who is to have the loot."

His final conclusion was that the profit belonged tothe public, and he arrived at it by this process ofthought :

"Take the wage side. Wages furnish purchasingpower, and the whole of business depends on people whoare able to buy and p ay . On the o ther hand, when specialpleaders begin to declare that wages should absorb allthe economies, all the increased profit made possible byindustrial improvements, it becomes necessary to call

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SWEAT IN PARADISEattention to the class nature of that limited point ofview. Most of our improvements are internal, that is,they occur within the management of the business, thelaying out of the work, the simplifying of the method,the saving of useless labor and wasted material, all ofwhich permits the service to be rendered at less costthan formerly.

"There are three ways in which this decreased cost,which is really increased profit, might go. We couldsay: We will keep it all, because it was our ability thatmade it possible. Or we could say: We will put it intothe wage envelopes. Or we could say: It costs less toproduce this thing, therefore the selling price ought tobe reduced to give the buyer the benefit.

"In the first instance the argument would be: Theextra profit belongs to those whose brains made it pos-sible. In the second instance the argument would be:The extra profit belongs to the workers, they are theproducers. In the third instance the argument wouldbe: The buying public has the right to necessities andservice at the lowest possible cost."Stating the arguments gives the answer. The benefitbelongs to the public. The owners and the workers willget their reward by the increased amount of businessthe lower prices bring. Industry cannot exist for aclass." *

The only source of profit was worknot hard work* Today and Tomorrow, by Henry Ford. Copyright 1926 byDoubleday & Co., Inc.

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THE WILD WHEELbut work well done. There was a difference. A man m ightwork very hard with his hands and never make agoodliving. Indeed, it was self-evident that agreat majori tyof people were no t capable either mentally or phy sicallyof making a good living for themselvesthat was tosay, they were unable with their hands tocreate theamount ofgoods the world needed, and therefore cer-tainly not enough to exchange for the goods they them-selves needed. That was where the machine came in.

His definition of work well done was to create some-thing that satisfied ahuman want and sell it at apriceeverybody could afford to pay. That meant tocreateit in great quantity. Men working with their handscould never produce that result, nor could they everearn high wages. Moreover, you would never be able tofind enough men with skill in their hands. "A millionmen working with their hands," he said, "could neverapproximate our daily output." And even if they could,how could you manage amillion men? But if you builtskill into the machine, set the machines close together,and caused the material to flow continuously throughthem, then you did two things at once, namely, youmade it possible for even unskilled workers to earn highwages and, secondly, with the product you satisfiedhuman wants that could not otherwise have been satis-fied a t allprovided only the workers were willing tomind the machines with diligence.

That was the pattern. Ford went so much further22


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SWEAT IN PARADISEand faster with it than anybody else that it came to beknown as the Ford idea.Some said he had taken skill out of work. His answerwas that by putting higher skill into planning, manage-ment and tool building, he made it possible for skill tobe enjoyed by the man who was not skilled.

T H E material effects were astounding. It was a methodthat did multiply wealth in a marvelous manner. Itmade it possible for anybody to own an automobile,including every Ford worker.

But it had other effects concerning which there couldbe diverse opinions. It required of the worker a kind ofautomatism corresponding to that of the machine heminded. He could not stop, nor slow down, because itwas all in one moving chain.

The norm of efficiencyeven that was transferredfrom the individual to the group. The individual in hisown free way might be able to produce more than theaverage, but as one of a group there would be no pointin it, for then he would have to wait on the others; onthe other hand, if he produced less than the average heslowed down the work and was removed.

But man is not an efficient animal really. He likes topause, to look at the chips, smoke, walk about a little,and then return to his work by an impulse and rhythmof his own. Secondly, it required a regimentation of the


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THE WILD WHEELworkers all the way down to the movements of their feetwhile at work.For example, the piston rod assembly. It was a verysimple operation. The foreman could not understandwhy it should take three minutes. He analyzed the mo-tions with a stop watch. Four hours out of aday werespent in walking, as the assembler gathered in his ma-terials and pushed away his finished work. The opera-tion was split into three parts, a slide was put on thebench, three men on each side of it and an inspector atthe end. One man then performed only one third of theoperation without shifting his feet. Where twenty-eightmen had turned out 175 assemblies a day, now sevenmen turned out 2,600.

Some of the repetitive work was so monotonous thatFord himself wondered how a man could stick to it.There was one man who did nothing but dredge smallgears in a vat of oil at the end of a rod and drop themone at a time in a basket. This required neither intelli-gence nor energy, yet he did that and nothing else foreight years, saved his wages and resisted any attemptto move him to another job, confirming Ford in theopinion that "the average worker wants a job in whichhe does not have to think."

And perhaps it would be just as well for a man notto think; the machine could do his thinking for him.Th ere was one who go t to th inking he was lopsided, butthat turned out to be something that had happened notto his body but to his mind. Ford told the story to

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SWEAT IN PABADISEprove his case that repetitive labor was not harmful:"T he re was one case of a man who all day long did littlebut step on a treadle release. He thought the motionwas making him one-sided. The medical examination didnot show that he had been affected. But of course hewas changed to a job that used another set of muscles.In afew weeks he asked for his old job back."

To save time and overhead and to keep the feet still,machines were placed closer and closer together untilyou might have thought they were jammed; but theroom amachine worker needed had been calculated tothe inch; also the cubic content of the air space abovehim, so that each one got the necessary amount of oxy-gen, and none wasted. "We put more machinery persquare foot of floor space than any other factory in theworld," said Ford. "Every foot ofspace not used car-ries an overhead expense. No man has too much roomand no man has too little."

By the mechanical extension of the man the produc-tive power of labor was enormously increased. Thus anhour of labor, being more productive, could be morehighly rewarded. Ifyou were going to keep wages goingup and prices going down, as Ford intended, there wasno other way to do it, and so far all to the good. Butman is more than avessel of labor. This was somethingthat had happened to him. His role in it was passive.And thoughtful people began now to ask seriously forthe first time:

W hich is the slaveman or machine ?25


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THE WILD WHEELFord's answer was to pose the problem of a man un-

able to earn a good living without machinery. Wouldyou withhold the machinery because attendance upon itmay be monotonous ? Or would you put him in the wayof a good living? And would a man be hap pier for usingthe machine to less than its capacity? Would he behappier for producing less than he might and conse-quently getting less than his share of the world's goodsin exchange?

The less the machine requires of the worker in theway of skill the more it demands of him in the way ofobedience, and this to the point at which you mayha rd ly say which is actin g the reflex of the machine orthe reflex of the worker who releases its power by step-ping on a treadle or touching a button. In the hands ofa skilled mechanic the hammer and chisel are obedientto his will, and it is a beautiful thing to watch. Set adozen cutting tools in an automatic machine, drivenby power, so that to produce a certain predeterminedtransfo rm ation of the raw m aterial the worker has onlyto perform a series of perfunctory motions, and whathave you ? Th e m an who performs the pe rfuncto ry mo-tions must absolutely obey the principles of the machine.Put thousands of such machines side by side with aperfunctory man in front of each one, then see that them aterial flows, and you have mass prod uction . But youhave also the necessity for extreme discipline. The manmust be an automaton too.

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SWEAT IN PARADISEThis Ford would not deny. Men had todo as they

were told. No organization sohighly specialized, onepart so dependent on another, could permit human be-ings to bewillful. Without the most rigid disciplinethere would be hopeless confusion. He thought it couldnot and should not be otherwise in industry.

The man will work fewer hours. He will exert himselfless to produce more. He will have more time for playafterward, and the money to play with; but the handat work will have no time for gladness.

He did not believe in the glad hand. He did not be-lieve in the personal touch. It was too late for that. Agreat business was really too big to be human. It hadsupp lanted the persona lity of the man. Th ere were menwho must always have anatmosphere of good feelingaround them before they could do their work. In theend they were failures. There was too much reliance ongood feeling in business organizations generally. Hewanted as little as possible of the personal element. Itwas not necessary for people to love each other in orderto work together. Too much good-fellowship could bea very bad thing, with one man trying to cover up thefaults of another. Some organizations used up so muchenergy and time m aintaining afeeling of harmony thatthey had no force left to work for the object for whichthe organization was created. A factory was not a draw -ing room. There need not be much personal contact.Simply, aman did his work and went home.27


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5T H E S E are hard sayings. To do his work with nogladness in it and then go home. Was that what a massproduction worker was for?

Henry Ford's answer to that question was both yesand no. The yes meant that the worker was an eight-hour automaton, serving the strict demands of the in-dustrial process. In that character he was a Fordinvention. The no meant that for the rest of his timethe man was a human being with a free life to live. Evenas an automaton he was better off than he had everbeen before, for if he were not here performing repeti-tive tasks in this clean and air-conditioned environmenthe would be selling his muscle in animal drudgery, dig-ging ditches in the sun or trying to wangle a living outof a Kentucky hill farm.

If the appearances were that the machine enslavedhim, even for eight hours, you were obliged to considerwhat the machine had done for him in his other charac-ter as a free human being. It enabled him to go homeear lier, to have a house such as no other unskilled workerhad ever been able to afford, and to go to and fro in anautomobile ofhis own. Beyond all that, you had tothink of him impersonally, in relation to a machine or-ganization which, for all its hardness, did multiply thewealth and leisure of society and increase the satisfac-tion of everyday living in a fabulous manner.

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SWEAT IN PARADISEIt would have been easier for the mass production

worker to see himself as Ford saw him but for a certaincontradiction. He was expected at the same time to bea self-resourceful individual in all circumstances, sotha t if he offended the deity and got fired or if themachine stopped, as it sometimes did, he could go forthon his own and take care of himself.

An idle machine creates no wealth, but neither doesit eat. An idle man likewise creates no wealth, and yethe must eat. Here an impasse occurs between two waysof thinking.

In Henry Ford's philosophy, the machine was an ele-mental force, blindly creative, like nature. How to re-lease it was man's g rea tes t discovery. Th e consequenceswere social and tremendous and might bring many newproblems, but these would be problems of hitherto un-imagined plenty, and you might trust them to solvethemselves; or you might think of the consequences asyou think of food as aconsequence of rain. But if themachine were not held relentlessly to its elemental func-tion the magnificent effects either would not follow orwould be in any case less extravagant. Therefore themachine must not be worried about the individual, anymore than nature is. Consider nature, how thoughtfulshe is for the species and how careless of the singlemember.

Ford once said that industry does not exist to sup-port people.


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THE WILD WHEELThat was the kind of startl ing thought that often

grew on the Fo rd tree, like an air pl an t, with ap pa ren tlyno roots at all.If industry does not exist to support people, what is

it for?His answer was that the purpose of industry was to

multiply and cheapen the cost of things that satisfyhuman wants.

To do i ts job properly it had to be efficient; to beefficient it had to be impersonal and ruthless, accordingto the laws of its own necessities. You could build skillinto the machine; you could not build into it both skilland sentiment. Social ideas such as continuity of em-ployment or spreading the work were sentimental.

It might well be that some parts of industry werebetter off working on a seasonal basis. In that caseseasonal unemployment was not the industry's fault butthe fault of men looking for a year's support from anindustry that could give only half a year's work. If anindustry could work steadily through the whole year,so much the better, but continuous employment mustnot be gained by spreading work and wages thin. Noth-ing was to be gained by thinking in that direction.

Yet he himself had been sometimes obliged to act inthat direction. He had been forced in some emergenciesto depart from this policy, spreading work among anumber of men, giving each man a few days aweek. Buthe regarded it as a makeshift and, in this scientific age,one that industry ought to be ashamed of.

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SWEAT IN PARADISEWhatever went wrong with his theory, this one or

any other, the fault was with people. If all industrywere scientifically organized and efficiently managed,then human livelihood, he thought, could be made assecure as the supply lines that brought raw material tothe machines, and the basis of a home could be as solidas the basis of a factory; and if, for all that, it shouldhappen that a man found himself out of a job, he couldvery easily save himself. How? That also was sim-pie.

The trouble with a man out of a job was that he wentlooking for another job instead of looking for work. Ifhe looked for work he was bound to find it. Ford saidof himself that he had often been out of a job but neverout of work.There was always plenty of work for everyone; itwas not possible for any man to do useful work with-out in some fashion receiving adequate payment. Hethought that if the jobless men even in the big citieswould attack the work they might see everywhere wait-ing to be done, they would quickly find that they hadmade good jobs for themselves, instead of waiting forjobs . Let them seek work before wages.

Such was the philosophy with which H enry Fo rd ap -proached the tragic failure of his career. This is re-membered as a failure in labo r relationship . It s m eaningwas much more tha n th at . I t was the failure to create asatisfactory race of machine people; or perhaps it wasonly th a t he tried to crea te it before its time.31


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THE WILD WHEEL

6H i s feelings for people were those of a shy, sensitive,egotistical man; but his feeling for the machine was anoriginal passion. One may believe that he was the firstto see what the machine was for. The right use of it wasnot simply to increase the leverage ofman's animalpower, so th a t he might perform his work with less exer-tion. No. But if you learned its inexorable laws andobeyed them the machine would transform society in awonderful manner, set it free from immemorial andwasteful drudgeries , fill its life w ith new and miraculousthin gs, and give it time to enjoy them.

A world that never could be made with hands.If you regard the machine in that light you may seethat its demands will be imperious. Once it was that a

man could think of the machine as serving him. Then atime of paradox comes. The machine itself demands tobe served, for unless it is served according to its ownlaws it will be unable to perform its miracle.

Does it then enslave the m an who serves it ?Ford said no. The only slave left on earth was man

minus the machine. T h a t you could see in othe r land smen and women hauling wood and stone and water ontheir backs, artisans clumsily spending long hours intoil for apaltry result, low standards of life, povertyto the edge of disaster. Such were the conditions wheremen had not learned the secrets of the machine. 3*


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SWEAT IN PARADISEYet as you watched the men on the Ford assembly

line there was no doubt about what you saw. The ma-chine was not the hand of the man extended; the manwas the hand of the machine. The man was serving themachine, and the service was both docile and servile. Ifthe hand failed the hand was wrong and the machinewas right.

If from the end of the assembly line you followed theautomobile out into the world, then you saw what Fordmeant. Unless human beings were serving the machine,and serving itaccording to its own law, people couldnot have these automobiles. And you might understandalso what Ford meant when he said it was asina sinagainst the welfare of societyto use a machine at lessthan its full capacity. "Is the man happier"the manwho serves the machine"for producing less than hemight and consequently getting less than his share ofthe world's goods in exchange?"

But the feeling of the normal mass productionworker was compounded of neither affection nor grati-tude. He did not invent the machine. It was not a toolhe could select or fashion to fit his hand. It was thehand of him that had tofithe machine; he could touchthe machine only by a series of disciplined dexterities,to actuate it; and if anything went wrong he could notfix it. An expert was called to do that. Certainly hecould never have that feeling for the machine that awoodsman has for his ax or the old-fashioned mechanic33


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THE WILD WHEELfor his hammer and cold chisel, with which he couldsmooth a plate of steel as if it had been passed througha planing lathe.

And as for seeing how it transformed the world, evena world that included himwell, yes, he could see thatdimly; and yet he knew that in that same world, for allits high common welfare, the anxieties of life were stillacute and personal. That he might own an automobilemade it no t always easier and sometimes even ha rder totake home the bacon.

The world that Henry Ford imagined, with everyhome as solid as a factory, did not exist, any more thanthe contented mass prod uction worker.

So long as the Ford wage was incomparably thehighest wage for unskilled and semiskilled men, theFord worker was loyal to the Ford job, but even thiswas more fear of losing the job than loyalty. Duringthis time F or d evidently thoug ht he was crea ting a raceof docile machine people. They willingly stretchedthemselves and submitted to the machine's discipline,which was terrific.But when the prevailing industrial wage in the De-troit region began to catch up with the Ford wage, sothat workers could choose, the loyalty of the Fordworker was much short of what Ford expected. Whenthe wage at G eneral M otors o r at Chrysler or any otherautomobile plant was as high as the Ford wage, thepicture began to change. Ford's "wage motive theory"of industry could not perform repetitive miracles; and

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SWEAT IN PARADISEhis advantage as the manu facturer who paid the highestwage and had therefore the lowest labor cost was lost.Pa r t ly it was transferred to the motor industry asa whole. As a high-wage industry, owing principally toFord's example, it was for a long time practically aunion-free industry. Unionism was defeated by the highwage. What had unionism to offer to these workers?

7T H E N came the Great Depression, and with it theWagner Labor Act, which transferred power frommanagement to labor; and the unions moved in, led byJohn L. Lewis. The wage rate was still high, but thewage rat e was no longer the measure of lab or's welfare.What mattered was the take-home pay, that is to say,the bacon; and what with the distress of unemploymentand the hardships of part t ime at the high wage rate,labor in the Detroit region was ingreat trouble.

The union leadership was adroit. First, General Mo-tors was struck, and while its plants were down Fordand Chrysler went on making cars. General Motorscould not stand that for long.

During a celebrated conference in the governor's of-fice at Lansing, Walter Chrysler beat his fist on thetable and said to Lewis:

"This isn't fair. You shut us down one at a t ime."Lewis said:"Chrysler, that 's the first reasonable thing you've

said since this conference started. I agree with you. It35


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THE WILD WHEELisn't fair. And I'll tell you how we'llfix t . TomorrowI'll close you all down."After that Chrysler threw in the sponge and signeda labor contract.

That left Ford, alone of the Big Three, standing byhimself. F o r a long time he stood alone against theunion.

Because he was going to be avery tough customerthe union hesitated totake him head on, preferringrather to build up a legal case against him before theNational Labor Relat ions Board. The Ford MotorCompany's violations of the law were flagrant and con-temptuous. The behavior of its workers was the concernof the largest and perhaps the most ruthless privatepolice force that was ever known in American industry.Every worker suspected the man at his side, who mightbe a company informer; ifhe went to aunion meetinghe was watched; if he indicated a sympathy for unionshe was fired.

I said to Ford at this time: "You are going to losethis fight."He asked: "Why do you say that?"

I said: "Because you are on the wrong side of thelaw."

His answer was: "There is a law of the job higherthan any law Congress can pass. The law of the job willprevail ."His feeling against unions was bitter and personal.It rested on two grounds. First, he intensely resented

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SWEAT IN PARADISEthe idea that unions could do more for Ford workersthan he did for them. Secondly, unions committed theunforgivable sin of interfering with the machine. Theyslowed it down. They insisted on running it at less thanits full capacity. That was to say, as was already evi-dent in the General Motors and Chrysler contracts,they laid their hands on production. They bargainedabout how fast the assembly line should run.

The feud was desperate and ugly on both sides. Therewere scenes of violence at the gates.

But the tide of a new social order was irresistiblyrising. Labor was arriving. No single large organiza-tion of industry, not even the Ford Motor Company,could afford not to make peace with it. The law was onthe side of labor, and under the law the union had builta case so dam aging t h a t a complete public revelation ofit might have destroyed the myth that the Ford workerwas the contented darling of mass production, whonever would have wavered in his loyalty but for thenefarious activities of the union leaders, egged on per-haps by rival industrialists and Wall Street. The mostardent believer in this myth to the very end was Fordhimself. He never understood why he had failed.

When at last he surrendered he did a characteristicthing. H e went overboard. He gave the union more th anit asked for. He signed a contract more favorable tolabor than General Motors or Chrysler or any othercompetitor had signeda contract that provided forcompulsory unionism in Ford plants, the collection of37


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THE WILD WHEELunion dues by the management out of the pay envelope,a union label for Ford products and badges for allmembers of the plant police, so that never again wouldthey be able to infiltrate themselves among the workers.

Was it a victory over Ford, as labor thought, or wasit a victo ry over the machine ?

In either case, as you may suppose, it was too muchfor the hotheads. Where before workers were not per-mitted to smoke anywhere on the premises or to loungeat ease when the assembly line broke down, now theydragged in vats of victory beer, played craps in theirleisure moments, smoked as they liked, and made any-body's tiff with a foreman the occasion for awildcatstrike.

At last the union leaders had the good sense to sidewith management in forbidding wildcat strikes, on painof lay-off or discharge. The machine commanded order.That was its minimum exaction.

Later Ford was induced to meet the labor leader whohad beaten him. William C. Richards, in The Last Bil-lionaire,* relates that Fo rd said to the labor leader: " I twas a sensible thing we did, getting you into the plant."

The labor leader said: "That 's what we think. Wedidn't know you thought so."

Ford said: "Well, you've been fighting General Mo-tors and the Wall Street crowd. Now you are in hereand we have given you a union shop and more than you* The Last Billionaire, by William C. Richards. Charles Scrib-ner's Sons, 1948.

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SWEAT IN PARADISEgot out of them. That puts you on our side, doesn't it?We fight them together from now on, don't we?"A brave and rueful statement, tainted by a lifelongsuperstition concerning his imaginary enemies and mel-ancholy in the twilight of his career.

More and more after that it was the organizationthat carried on. The tyrant 's hand relaxed. His mostdogmatic theory had been badly damaged. Was itun-sound? Inany case, it assumed a world that did notexist. Perhap s it was only m isplaced in time.

8B U T inthe Ford cosmos there was an astronomicalfirst law that never failed. You could not define it, or ifyou could itwould be something else. It came to beadisembodied force in itself, like a demon spirit, demand-ing sacrifice, burnt offerings and worshipful rites. Itsname was production.

The spectacle of production is visible phenomena,and yet incomprehensible to the mind. There is no pointof view from which you can see where itbegins or how,or what moves it. In a moment of bemusement thethought may occur to you that what you are lookinga t is planetary . It moves itself. Nobody does it. Humanagencies are present and accessory, but somehow ir-relevant, as if it were necessary only that people shouldhave something to do.

I knew aFord production boss who once dreamed itthat way. He saw the mighty plan t as awhole, produc-39


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THE WILD WHEELtion taking place at high speed as if the feud with timemight be lost, finished automobiles chopping off likesausages at the end of the assembly line at the rate ofone a minute, and not one human being there, union ornonuniononly Ford as a phantom in every doorway,holding a stop watch. And coming awake from thedream was not like a retu rn from anywhere stra ng e, be-cause it had seemed so almost real.

Th e strug gle w ith union labor came to a crisis in war-time. A conflict of such bitterness might have been ex-pected towreck production. It did not. The Fordcontribution to national defense was, nevertheless, pro-digiousa contribution of things the great mechanicshad never made before, such as guns and gun mounts,tanks , amphibious vehicles, aircraft engines and bomberp a r t s ; and the Willow Run bomber plant, designed bySorensen, to cut off a bomber an hour at the end of theassembly line, was ep ic.

9I T W O U L D never have occurred to Ford to thinklabor had been ungrateful. It was only that the mind ofunionism had no t been able to u nderstan d what he calledthe wage motive for industry, over the profit motive.His theory of the wage motive forbade him to expectgratitude. When he doubled wages in the first demon-stration, and when after that he raised them again,generosity was ruled out. It had to pay. It had to bene-fit everybodythe consumer, the wage earner and the

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SWEAT IN PARADISEFord Motor Company. When organized labor rejectedhis wage motive theory, in fact ruined it, the old dis-astrous fallacy was restoredthe fallacy, namely,that the rate of wage was determined by the bargainingpower of labor acting against the monopoly power ofthe employer.

High wages, he insisted, were more important tobusiness than to lab or. Low wages would break ind us trymuch more quickly than they would break labor.

He was thinking there not of old industry but of newind us try , based on mass prod uc tion . And why would lowwages break that kind of industry sooner than labor?Because an underpaid man was a customer reduced inbuying power. He was a poor customer. If you reducedwages you actually reduced work because you reducedthe demand for work.

Th ere was in fact no stan da rd of wages, no limitationupon them except that set by the efficiency of industrypursuing the wage motive. If you set yourself to payhigh wages, then you would find methods of manufac-turing that would make high wages cheap wages.Nor was the wage motive theory in any sense a socialtheory. Nearly every social theory, he believed, was aformula for living without work. And the world beingwh at it was, all such theories could lead only to po ve rtybecause they were not prod uctive.

Nevertheless, the impact of the original five-dollarday upon the lives of Ford workers was so terrific thathe felt he had to look at what they did with the money.4 1


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THE WILD WHEELDid they use it to improve their standard of living ordid they waste it? So he was persuaded to set up a So-cial Department, with a staff of trained social serviceworkers, to impose upon these high wage people acodeof living. They had to be sober, they had to like workand they had to be family-loving. Since now for the firsttime they could afford decent homes, they were forbid-den to take in boa rders. T h a t was a custom among themthat made the home "a place to make money out ofrather than aplace to live in."

That was his first experience with paternalism. In afew years he was sick of it. He distrusted social serviceworkers as astrange race and their language botheredhim. Suddenly, out went the Social Department. Letpeople manage their own lives.What if they did not use their spare time to the bestadvantage? That was not for the Ford Motor Companyto say, provided their work was better. The averageman would find his own best way, even tho ugh th a t waymight not exactly fit into the programs of the socialreformers.Although the fact that people had more leisure andmore money was wonderful in itself, it was nothing theyshould be expected to feel grateful for. The truth wasthat to provide more leisure, and then the money withwhich people could enjoy it, had become a necessity ofmass production industry.

W hy ? Well, was not the influence of the shorter workweek on consumption obvious? If factories generally

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SWEAT IN PARADISEwent back to the ten-hour day, industry would sufferbecause people would not have time toconsume thegoods produced. For instance, aworkman would havelittle use for an automobile if he had to be in the shopfrom dawn to dark. Of course there was a humanitarianside to the shorter day and the shorter week, but dwell-ing on that side was likely to distort the view, for thenleisure might be put before work, instead of after work,where it belonged.

And that was something the machine had done. Thatwas the world that could not have been made by hands.The hours of work, he insisted, were regulated by themachine and by the large-scale organization of workand by no thing else.

T h a t was in 1930 . H e could see no limit to it.Paternalism, moreover, had an air of charity aboutit, and that he hated; he thought very ill of charity. "Itis adrug," he said. There were emergencies when menand women, and especially children, needed help, butthese cases were no t actually as numerous as they seemedto be. The very fact that charity could be had increasedthem, for charity held out the promise of something forno thing. The cases of re al need could be looked after ona personal basis without destroying, as by the ma-chinery of organized charity, the values of self-respect.

All of his own charities were governed by that theme.He once made ahome for orphans and afterward toldof his disappointment with it. Once aweek he went tosee how it was gettin g on. The m ana gers , who were sup-43


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THE WILD WHEELposed to be qualified men, seemed to think of it as aplace in which to confine ch ildren. So he scrap ped it andgot the children adopted into private homes. The sick-liest boy of all was adopted by awoman who alreadyhad six of her own.

From all of these excursions he came back to thesame place. W hat m attered above all was the wage. No ta social wage, not a generous wage, not a wage arrivedat by the bargaining power of either labor or the em-ployer, but a scientific wage determined by the wagemotive. There was no social service that could take theplace of wages. Let the wage be the highest that massproduction could afford to pay and you would not haveto worry much about people. It was very simple, really.Any confusion about it could usually be traced back"to an unwillingness on the part of someone to work."It was management 's part so to arrange and organizework that it could produce high wages, but the startingpoint of high wages was the willingness to work. With-out that willingness, management was powerless.

And that held as much for work of the mind as forwork of the hand.How long could industry last on the purchasing

power of those whose income was independent of whatthey received from work? The country was maintainedby work. And the evidence of work was wages.

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TWO

SEEDS OF THE MONKEYWRENCH

X o R the grand mechanics work was play. Ifit had not been play it would have killed them. Theywere asmen possessed. They often forgot toeat. Asthey drove the workers, so they drove themselves, onlymuch harder; and machines they drove until the metalached.

Once some machine builders were called in to bid on aspecial machine. The specifications called for a speedth a t would produce two hundred finished p a rt s an hou r.The machine builders said: "You have made amistakehere. You meant to say two hundred aday." The Fordengineer who had made the design was called in. Hesaid : "T he re is no mistake. Two hundred an ho ur ." Th emachine builders said: "No machine can do that." Theengineer said: "Before asking you to make itwe madeone for ourselves, to see if itwould work. It's workingnow. Come and see it."

F o r a new machine th a t worked or a new wrinkle th a tgave time another kick in the pants their glee was like45


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THE WILD WHEELt ha t ofchildren with awonderful toy. If the idea hadcome from a foreman, or aworker, as sometimes hap-pened, Ford would stuff the man's pocket with moneyon the spot. Yet no sooner had it worked than they allbegan to think of ways to make itwork better, and ifanybody could think of a way to do that the wonderfultoy was broken up for scrap.

When it was the wonder plant of the world for doingimpossible things in unheard-of ways they were still sosure they could do every thing still better that anybodywas welcome to come and look, even rival motorcarmakers, Ford saying: "If they can do it better than wedo it they are welcome to it. Then we will go and lookat what they do."

W hat moved them ? You may think of several motiva-tions.There is pride in belonging to the most famous crew

in the world, even though your own part in itmay besmall. If you are on the top side of a crew like that youhave of course a sense of achievement by association.M oreover, since it was a monarchy, almost anyone mighthope to be struck by the Cinderella lightning. When aman was called from his work to go immediately to theoffice it could be either that he was important enoughto get fired by a high executive or that he was about tobe invested with a fragment of the magic carpet, hold-ing in his hand the Ford wand that commanded men andmaterials in a very imperious manner. He might be sentto open a coal mine, to ru n a rai lroad or to revolution-

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SEEDS OF THE MONKEY WRENCHize a lumber operation, and ifhe knew nothing aboutmining or railroadin g or lumbering, tha t was all the bet-ter. W hatever the task m ight be, it was supposed t h a t hecould do it better than anyone had done it before if onlyhe possessed these four qualifications, namely, commonsense, drive, a direct way of seeing and the Ford credo,which was: "We do it our way." His instructions werealways simple. Go do it. If he couldn't, another would.

All of this could happen because Ford did not be-lieve in experts. "Our men are not experts," he said."We have most unfortunately found it necessary to getrid of aman as soon as he thinks himself an expert.The moment one gets into the expert state of mind agreat number of things become impossible. Our newoperations are always directed by men who have noprevious knowledge of the subject and therefore havenot had achance to get on really familiar terms withthe impossible."

One of his illustrations was glass. He thought plateglass could be made continuously in abig ribbon withno hand work a t all. Th e glass experts of the world saidall of that had been thought of before and tried and itcould not be done. He gave the task of doing it to menwho had never been in a glass p la n t.

They did itwith such marvelous success that noweverybody makes plate glass that way.

If experts were needed, they could always be hired,but no Ford operation was ever directed by a techni-cian. He always knew too many things that couldn't be47


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THE WILD WHEELdone, whereas aFord man could do anything becausehe didn't know any better. The Ford man's role wasto say to the expe rt: "Do it anyhow."

The question was: What moved them? The answersthat have been given are all reasonable and valid, withonly this reservation, that it was not a famous crew inthe beginning and there was not always aFord wand.That also had to be created.

Do you say, perhaps, itwas profit, or the hope ofprofit? This calls for a discussion that belongs in anotherplace, by itself. It is true that Ford was the greatestprofit maker of his time. It is true also that aloneamong the industria lists of his time or any other time hesincerely challenged the profit motive. More of thislater. It is the enigma that lies at the very core of thestory of a world that almost was.

No. What moved them was something that was therefrom the start.

E V E N SO, the beginning took place under appearanceswhich were in every way ordinary, with no signs oromens whatever. If you had witnessed it you would notremember it as anything uncommon. The same thingwas happening at the same time in other places.

In a low frame building, 25 by 250 feet, you mighthave seen some perspiring men putting together whatstill were called horseless carriages. They had no ma-chineryonly tools like monkey wrenches, hammers,

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SEEDS OF THE MONKEY WRENCH

screw drivers and pliersbecause machinery was costlyand they could not afford to buy it. The horseless car-riage was not made here. The engines were made by adi stan t m achine shop a t so much apiece, the bodies weremade by a c arr iag e com pany, the wheels by a wheel com-pa ny , and so on ; and all th a t these men were doing wasto assemble a horseless carriage from finished parts de-livered at the door by horse-drawn drays. They ex-pected to assemble ten aday. They expected also, asthey sold the ten a day, to be able to pay the machineshop for the engines, the carriage shop for the bodies,the wheel company for the wheels, et cetera, and theyhad to do it fast with no mishap, for they had almostno money at all.

The boss mechanic, who was also vice-president andgeneral manager, might have been seen helping to nailthe completed jobs into a boxcar for shipment, withmail piling up on a little upstairs desk for a month, be-cause nobody could take the time to open it. When atlas t they hired a bookkeeper, he found two wastebasketsfull of unopened letters, some of them containingchecks.

You would not have remembered the boss mechanic.He was a thin, tall, deep-eyed man, alternately impishand austere, who couldn't be still. He had designed theengine that came from the machine shop. His name wason the horseless carriage.Ten years before with his own hands he had made anautomobile buggy; it was neither the first nor the best49


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THE WILD WHEELone. He had built a racing carthe famous 999thatuttered flames from the exhaust and sounded like thejungle in an animal panic; but others too had builtracing cars and his was only a little bit faster. He wasone of a number of men celebrated in automobile historywho for years had been blowing themselves up in theirwoodsheds and kitchens trying to find out what hap-pened when amixture of air and gasoline was ignitedin a cylinderand they were all nuts. As a pioneermanufacturer of motorcars he had already failed twice,losing his backers' money, and that was about theaverage.

It was a time when adventuresome men with a littlemoney and a dim prevision of the motorcar industrywere looking for inventors on whom to make their bets;and it often happened that they made their bets se-cretly, fearful that if their conservative business associ-ates, and especially their bankers, found out what theywere doing they would be written off as loony vision-aries.

Several of these, having looked over the field, pickedon Henry Ford, partly on their guess that he was agood inventor and partly because he had aname thatmight help to sell a carthe name of aman who hadbuilt the fastest racing car and had driven ithimself.In My Life and Work he remembered his last race, thepurpose of which was to advertise the Ford car, alreadyon the m ark et. This was his recollection of i t :

"Winning a race or making a record was then the50


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best kind of advertising. So I fixed up the Arrow, thetwin of the old 999in fact practically remade itand a week before the New York automobile show Idrove it myself over a surveyed mile straightaway onthe ice. I shall never forget that race. The ice seemedsmooth enough, so smooth that if I had called off thetrial we should have secured an immense amount of thewrong kind of advertising; but instead of being smooth,that ice was seamed with fissures which I knew weregoing to mean trouble the moment I got up speed. Butthere was nothing to do but go through with the trial,and I let the old Arrow out. At every fissure the carleaped into the air. I never knew how it was comingdown. When I wasn't in the air I was skidding; butsomehow I stayed top side up and on the course, makinga record that went all over the world." *

His biographers note that he celebrated his survival,and the record, with a muskrat dinner cooked on thespot and eaten with the man who rode along tocutoff the fuel by hand in case the control mechanismfroze.

T H E men who made their bets on Ford were a coaldealer, the coal dealer's bookkeeper and his sister, abanker who trusted the coal dealer, two brothers whoowned the machine shop that made the engines, a car-

*My Life and Work, by Henry Ford. Copyright 1922 byDoubleday & Co., Inc.51


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THE WILD WHEELpenter, two lawyers, a clerk, the owner of a notionsstore and a man who made windmills and air rifles. Theengine builders put in their good will. The carpenterput in a frame building. The total amount of cashraised among them was twenty-eight thousand dollars.

One of the law yers, who was going to p u t in fivethousand dollars, accounted for it in a letter to hisfather, saying:

"Through the country Mr. Ford is looked upon asan expert. He has won numerous racing contests andis widely known, which will be a big asset in his own carsales. The old machine which he built he sold to hisformer backers when he retired. H e did reserve the rightof his own name. They cannot take that away fromhim. . . . The parts are to be made under contract.. . . A small assembling pla nt will be rented to thecompany at $75 amonth. In this plant there will beten or twelve men at $1.50 a day, together with a fore-man. You can see how small the m anu factu ring expensewill be. . . . It looks like a certain fifty per centprofit. . . . They are to deliver ten machines a day.. . . I t is amazing the way the thing has been started.Everything has been done since last October. Othercompanies with half a dozen draftsmen under lock andkey have been three years making the same progress."

That was in 1903.Ten years later every other car you saw on the roadwas a Ford. The sounds of the Model Tits gutturals

and verbs and lamentations and chortlingwere the52


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overtones of the American way of life. At HighlandPark, in a suburban area ofDetroit , was the largestautomobile factory in the world, turning out a completecar every three minutesand the boss mechanic wasthe same man still.

By this time he had bought out all the other stock-holders, so that never again when they thought he wasmad could they threaten to take him to co urt. Th ey h adthought he was mad when he said he was going to makeautomobiles at the rate of one a minute. Then in a littlewhile, from the sour grape arbor, they saw him do it.

But even yet he had not arrived. He was on his way.After Highland Park, where at length Model T's did

depart under their own power from the end of the as-sembly line at the rate of one a minuteafter thatcame the mighty River Rouge plant at Dearborn.

That was the beginning of empire. It seemed to riseas if it contained a principle of self-creation. Ford said," P u t it here," and there it was. So Alexander madecities to appear.

It had a river God made, not a very efficient river,and Ford dug the harbor that God forgot in order toreceive ships from the inland sea. Besides ships of itsown, it had its own coal and iron and lead mines, its ownrailroad, its own forests and sawmills. It had organsand operations in every important American city andin Canada, Europe, South America and Asia.A ny thing it needed it could make for itself, and manythings itmade just to learn how in case its suppliers53


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THE WILD WHEELshould begin to charge too much, or as insuranceagainst the failure of its outside sources of supply. Itmade steel, machines, tools, the finest precision gaugesin the world, glass, artificial leather, textiles, paper,cement, electric locomotives, chemicals, hydroelectricdams and airplanes. It built its own power plants, itsown steam turbines and generators.

After World War I it bought a lot of Liberty Shipsfor scrap and then built a pair of shears to slice themup as if they were cheese.

For grand mechanics, this was Heaven. Anythingthey saw or anything they imagined, that they coulddo. The government wanted some antisubmarine boats,provided they could be built in agreat hurry withoutinterfering with any other war work. In 120 days, atRiver Rouge, there was a building aquarter of a milelong, 350 feet wide and 100 feet high, and inside of itEagle Boats, stamped out of sheet steel like automo-bile bodies, were being engined and equippedand thisthe work not of marine engineers but of mechanics whohad never built a boat before.

A t a nod from the boss mechanic prodigious featswere lightly undertaken and performed with the air ofcon ju ry . T o u proo t the entire tr a ct o r pla nt from thebank of the River Rouge and set it down in Ireland wasa mere chore.

And this behemoth by exerting itself could producein the world automobiles at the rate of one every tenseconds.

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If you say, "And all of that in one working lifetimefrom an original cash capital of twenty-eight thousanddollars," the answer is yes, as a matter of fact. Thatwas all the money that anybody ever put in. From thattime on the business made its own capital. But that isonly to saywhat? That one acorn grew in a fabulousmanner. Why did this one grow so big and tall? Was ita true fact of nature or a capricious event out of order?

That is what now stands to be explored.

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THREE

G E N E S I S A N D E V O L U T I O N

TJ L H E jigsaw itself was a little crazy. You

may identify the interlock ing pieces. Th ey are five, andyou may name them as the c a r , the t ime, the idea, themethod and the m a n ; but when you have fitted themtogether you find something like a key piece missing.This you may call the X piece. I t will tu rn out to be no ta fact but a truth, touching the acorn.

So first the car.During the first five years the Ford Motor Company

made eight different models, some with two cylinders,some with four and one with six; some with a chaindrive and some with a shaft drive, and one with the en-gine behind the driver's seat. They were all good cars,as cars were then, and relatively cheap; and they soldso well that the business flourished. The original fac-to ry space had expanded five-fold in D etroi t, the re werefourteen branch houses, and the output was one hun-dred cars a day, when several of the eleven other stock-holders became uneasy. They thought that was successenough. In My Life and Work Ford wrote : 56


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GENESIS AND EVOLUTION"They wanted to do something to stop me from ruin-

ing the company, and when I replied to the effect thatone hundred cars a day was only a trifle and that Ihoped before long to make a thousand a day, they wereinexpressibly shocked and, as I understand, seriouslycontemplated court action. If I had followed the gen-eral opinion of my associates I should have kept thebusiness about as it was, put our funds into afine ad-ministration building, tried to make bargains with suchcompetitors as seemed too active, made new designsfrom time to time to catch the fancy of the public, andgenerally have passed into the position of a quiet re-spectable citizen with a quiet respectable business." *

There were omens now, bu t they were still so dim th a teven the few who thought they could see them had mo-ments of doubt and panic. They might have beenhypnotized by a man who kept thinking out loud abouta universal car for the people at the price of a horseand buggy.

He was by this time in control of the company, hav-in g a clear majority of the stock in his name, andcould do as he pleased, unless his associates took him tocourt to protect their profits from his devouring imagi-nation. They actually did that later.

One morning in 1909, with no warning to anybody,he announced th a t he was going to make only one carand it would be the Model T. One might have it as a

*My Life and Work, byHenry Ford. Copyright 1922 byDoubleday & Co., Inc.57


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THE WILD WHEELroadster or as acoupe, which was adifference of bodyonly, and the buyer could have it an y color he liked p ro -vided he wanted it black. In every other way theseModel T's would be all exactly alike. His public an-nouncement read:

"I will build amotor car for the great multitude. Itwill be large enough for the family but small enough forthe individual to run and care for. It will be constructedof the best materials, by the best men to be hired, afterthe simplest designs that modern engineering can de-vise. But it will be so low in price that no man makinga good salary will be unable toown oneand enjoywith his family the blessing of hours of pleasure inGod's great open spaces."

In the next nineteen years he made fifteen million ofthem.As Ford saw it the Model Thad but four essentials.

They were the power plant, the frame, the front axleand the rear axle, all so designed that no special skillwould be required to repair or replace them. Any mem-ber of the male race could take it apar t and put ittogether again.

Ford's intention was tomake the parts first inter-changeable and then so simple and inexpensive that theowner of acar would never hire amechanic. The partswould cost so little that it would be cheaper to buy newones than to have old ones repaired, and they could becarried in hardware shops like nails or bolts.

Those who can remember their Model Tdays will be58


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GENESIS AND EVOLUTIONreminded of how they used to take the car apart with amonkey wrench and pliers, put the used or damagedp a rt s in a gunny sack, take the sack to the nearest Fo rdstation where it would be filled with new parts in ex-change for the oldand a slight difference to paythen home to put it all together again, with a perfectlyabsurd sense of ego satisfaction. More Model T's wererebuilt in that manner, in barns and sheds and underthe shade tree, than were ever sent to service stations.

I T IS impossible for members of this generation toknow what a displacement the Model T had in the livesof their fathers. It was amechanical animal such asnever existed before and will never be seen again. Itchanged the folkways of a nation. It enriched the fundof native humor and became the butt of so many jokesthat it was always on the defensive, which alone wouldhave endeared it to a large segment of human nature.It had some of the characteristics of amule, the pa-tience of a camel, the courage of a bull terrier, and inbad situations it could be very gallant, although therewas latent in it a whimsical hostility to the human race.When you cranked it on a cold morning it might comeat you. To know if it had oil in the crankcase you hadto crawl under it and fiddle with two pet cocks. Toknow where the gas was you had to lift the seat cushion,unscrew the cap and poke a stick into the gas tank. Inemergencies it could do without either oil or gas. It had59


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THE WILD WHEELno speedometer. If you drove too fast and the enginegot red hot you stopped to let it cool off. In the hills atnight you could hear it, almost as one of the sounds ofnature, taking agrade and saying:

Afraid-I-can9t afraid I c a n H -T h e n :YeslcanyeslcanyeslcanThat was when itwas pushed into low gear and went

over the top.And it was uglyugly at first and uglier with the

years. In the beginning it had some brass mountingsand tu rned wooden knobs on the qu ad rant . These refine-ments disappeared one by one, until at last there wasnowhere on it or in it one extra flourish of craftsman-ship. Th is ruthless simplification took place as the p ricefell. "The price," said Ford, "is an in tegral par t ofthe design." The price fell from $1,200 to $295, and thecar became a thing of stark utility.

The loyalty of people toModel T for nearly twodecades was both rational and partisan. Ford car own-ers were sensitive. A joke was all right if itwas meantright; aspersions they resented personally. In any case,they had the unanswerable retort. The one thing itcould never be accused ofwas failure. It never failed,or almost never, and if it did"that," said Ford, "ismy fault ."

N ot only was it ligh t in weight and a high stepp er fordirt ro ads , getting throu gh when other cars stuck fa st ;

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GENESIS AND EVOLUTIONit was in all essential respects very excellently made.The choke rod might look like apiece of bailing wire,but it never broke, and the steel of the chassis, the axlesand other important parts had the toughness of origi-nal sin.

Long before Model T , F o rd one day picked up a stemvalve from the wreck of aFrench racing car. Itwaslight and very strong and nobody knew what kind ofsteel it was. He sent it to a metallurgist for analysis. Itturn ed out to be vanadium steel. No A merican steel millhad ever made it. He brought a man from Europe whoknew how and then subsidized asmall steel mill to tryit"For," he said, "that is the kind of steel Iwant forthe universal car I am going to build." After some fail-ures he got it, and it was nearly three times as strongas the steel American motorcars until then were madeof. After that he measured the demands an automobilemade upon the steel in its different parts and ended byputting twenty kinds of steel in the Model Tone kindfor toughness, one kind for hardness, another for elas-ticity, and so on.A T T H E age of nineteen Model T died. It froze todeath.

One weakness of mass production is rigidity. Varietyand quantity are strangers. If i t is quantity you wantyou are obliged, as the engineers say, to "freeze" thedesign.6 l


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THE WILD WHEELWhen you have miles of machines all tuned and

geared in a certain way, each machine doing only thespecial thing it has the habit of doing, and from thesemachines more than one hundred thousand parts flow-ing with timed precision to amoving assembly line tofall exactly into place on the automobile that grows asit moves and is finished when itgets to the end of thelinethen you have mass production. But obviouslyyou cannot change the design of the automobile w ithouttearing your factory to pieces. A change of design willmean new parts, and for new parts you will need newmachines and time to teach new habits to old machines.Ford was first with this method and went further withit than anybody else, and that was why he could keepreducing the price of the car. He was continuallyadding new and more powerful machines, but onlyfor the purpose ofmaking the same car faster andfaster.

So it was that year after year it was the same ModelT, and the more itchanged in little ways the more itwas the same thing still.Meanwhile, everything else was changing. Dirt roadsturned to concrete. People grew richer and could paymore for automobiles. Other motorcar makers, follow-ing F ord 's m ethods, were able to br ing down the cost ofmuch more attractiv e cars.

First the Dodge brothers, who had got very richmaking Ford's engines until he began making them forhimself, brought out a very good small car, and said as

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GENESIS AND EVOLUTIONthey did it: "Think how many Ford buyers would liketo own a real automobile by paying only a little more."That was adagger thrust .

Then General Motors began to displace Model Twith its Chevrolet, as that car evolved in the hands ofa production genius named William S. Knudsen, whohad learned how with F or d.

Even Ford jokes had used themselves up, all but thelast and most cruel one of all, from Will Rogers.

In one of its unpredictable moods the country hadgone dithery over the thought of Henry Ford for Presi-dent, to succeed Coolidge. Rogers drawled that to gethimself elected it would be necessary for Ford to sayonly: "Voters, if you elect me I'll change the frontend."F o r a long time the boss mechanic lingered at thebedside of his creature. He could see it was very sick;he was slow to believe the disease could be fatalthedisease of change. He blamed his salesmen, the times,the mores and manners. The people were running afterstyle; they were beguiled by appearances. The one rem-edy he could think of was his own patent price pare-goric, but the magic was no longer in it. Fewer andfewer people wanted Model T's. That was the fact hehad to face.

When at last he faced it and gave up the struggle hewent overboard. He would not change the Model T.He would make a new car, from the tread up. That wasthe beginning of the Model A.63


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THE WILD WHEEL

I N A plant that had made 1,800,000 cars a yearmore than four aminuteeverything stopped. Everymachine in it had to be remade, retaught or sent to thefurnace. Hundreds of new machines had to be invented.An entirely new way of doing things had to be evolved.

W hile the Fo rd pl an t was down cold, General M otorswith its on-coming Chevrolet, and now also Chryslerwith his first c ar , were tak ing the low-priced field. F orddealers had nothing to sell.

Could he do it?That became a national question. Starting from taw,

with nothing behind him but the rejected Model T,could he produce what might be called a modern auto-mobile good enough and soon enough to meet all thisnew com petition? The odds were so heavily ag ain st him,as rational people thought, that at that time the fabu-lous Ford Motor Company could not have been sold inWall Street at five cents on the dollar.

One day the executives of a large Philadelphia ad-vertising agency called me on the telephone. They hadtaken the con trac t to do publicity for the new Fo rd ca r,and one of their ideas was to take some writers out toDearborn to witness the evolution of it on the spot.Would I go? I said I was intending to go out, but notunder the auspices of an advertising agency.

They said: "That's all right. Anyhow, we're not so


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GENESIS AND EVOLUTIONsure now it's a good idea. You know these people, d on 'tyou?"

I said yes, I knew them.They said: "Let's forget the idea. Will you meet us

for lunch? The re's som ething we want to talk to youabout ."

At lunch they said: "Like everybody else, we've longbeen sold on the myth of Ford efficiency. Now we areout there looking at it. We've been there three months.We don't see it. In fact, we can hardly believe whatwe see."

I asked: "What do you see?"They said: "You won't believe it either. There

stan ds the ca r in the middle of the floor, nearly finishedso fa r as we can make out. Every m orning the engineersgather around it, just looking at it, waiting for Fordto appear. When he comes he reaches inside, rattlessomething, shakes his head and says, 'That won't do.You've got to think of something better than that. ' Oneof them says, 'Can you think of anything, Mr. Ford?'He rattles the thing again, walks a little off and comesback, makes some pencil marks on a piece of paper,hands it to them and says, 'Try something like that. 'The next morning they gather round the car again, andwhen Ford comes in he asks, 'Got it on?' They say,'Yes, Mr. Ford. ' He reaches in, rattles the thing again,whatever it is, makes a gesture of disgust and says,'That's worse.' With that he walks off, leaving them65


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THE WILD WHEELthere gazing at the car. It 's like that day after day,with the whole coun try screaming for the new Ford ca r.We don't understand it ."

I said: "You don't know what you are looking at.That's invention and it cannot take place in any otherway. Wait until the car is on the assembly line andthen look for efficiency."

A little later I was in Dearborn. Knowing what theold practice had been, I was amazed at how they weresetting up to make the new car . Th e cranksh aft forexample. Formerly, truing the forged crankshaft hadbeen the work of a blacksmith, who held it on an anvil,sighted it, hit it here and there with a machine hammer,sighted it again, and then threw iton the pile. Thatwas all right for the Model T. It would not do at allfor the new car. Now they had a machine on which tospin the crankshaft at variable rates of speed; vibra-tion was indicated on dials of sensitive recording instru-ments, and by other instruments the light and heavyspots on the forging could be exactly located for cor-rection. That was one reason why the new car's enginewas going to be much smoother than the Model T en-gine. And that kind of new practice went through theentire plant.

I was in Cameron's office when Ford came in. ThePhiladelphia advertising people were sitting in the cor-ner, to listen. With the air of one who expects to beunderstood Ford said to me: "I believe in what we aredoing. We had to do it. But you know, the only thing

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GENESIS AND EVOLUTIONwrong with the Model Twas that people got tired oflooking at it."That was, I think, the only statement of defeat Iever heard him make about anything.

I said: "The new car will be good. Everybody knowsthat. But the Chevrolet and the Plymouth are goodcars too. What are you going tosay about the newFord car that they cannot say about theirs?"

With a gesture of impatience he replied: "I don'tknow. Ask the advertising people over there. That'stheir job."

To tease the advertising men in the corner, I said:"Do you think advertising sells a car?"

He answered shortly and emphatically: "No. A carhas got to sell itself."

I asked: "Then why are you going to advertise thisnew car in a big way ?"

At that he gave what was perhaps the best argumentfor advertising the listeners in the corner had everheard, tofit acase like this.

He said: "They kept atme about ituntil I was sickof the subject. At last I said, 'All right. If you haveto have that kind ofdoctor, get the best one you canfind.' Since then I've been thinking about it and nowI'm for it. You know why? The Ford Motor Companyis so big that ithas to include everything. Advertisingis a special feature of the American scheme. Advertis-ing has to live too. For that reason we have to includeit."6/


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THE WILD WHEELI said: "Now you are going to make all the new cars

you can an

the wild wheel - garrett

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