Author Richard Snow Discusses His New Book: I Invented The Modern Age: The Rise Of Henry Ford

Fri, 10/30/2009 - 10:47am

When: May 20, 2013 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

Henry Ford was born the year of Gettysburg and died two years after the atomic bombs fell - and in that time become the most famous and richest man in America. Richard Snow, acclaimed popular historian and former editor-in-chief of American Heritage Magazine, will discuss Henry Ford and Snow's just-released (May 14) new book "I Invented The Modern Age: The Rise Of Henry Ford," a meticulous and entertaining account of Ford, the Model-T, and the remaking of American industry in the early 20th century. This special event will also include a book signing and books will be for sale.The car made Ford a national hero-- but that's not the end of the story. Ford was driven by a sense of messianic philanthropy, but once he'd achieved his goal he felt fettered by his very success. In Snow's capable hands, Ford is a tragic figure we watch rise and fall. Filled with scene and incident, character and dialogue, Snow's book presents us with the young, unknown, industrious, and altogether resourceful young man rising in the years when people were vying to build the machine that would define the dawning age in America. In many ways his story is well known, but Snow sheds new light onto this fascinating man by viewing him through his greatest creation-- the Model T.Richard Snow worked at American Heritage magazine for nearly four decades and was its editor-in-chief for seventeen years. The author of several books, Snow has also served as a consultant for historical motion pictures --among them "Glory" --and has written for documentaries, including the Burns brothers' "Civil War," and Ric Burns's award-winning PBS film "Coney Island," whose screenplay he wrote. Most recently, he served as a consultant on Ken Burns' World War II series, "The War."

Transcript

• [00:00:00.00] [MUSIC PLAYING]
• [00:00:23.20] TIM GRIMES: All right. Good evening, everybody, and welcome to the Ann Arbor District Library. My name is Tim Grimes. I'm the manager of community relations and marketing here at the library. And thank you so much for coming out tonight. This promises to be a special program and we're very, very happy to have you here.
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• [00:01:37.33] And tonight is a very special event. It's my pleasure, I'm going to be introducing Richard Snow. Richard was born in New York City and graduated with BA from Columbia College in 1970. He worked at American Heritage magazine for nearly four decades and was his editor in chief for 17 years. He's the author of several books, among them two novels, a volume of poetry also. And he served as a consultant for several historical motion pictures, among them Glory.
• [00:02:09.02] He's written for documentaries including the Burns brothers' Civil War and Rick Burns' award winning PBS film, Coney Island who's screenplay he wrote. Most recently he served as a consultant on Ken Burns' World War II series, The War. And his most recent book, which he'll be discussing tonight is I Invented the Modern Age, the Rise of Henry Ford. Please help me welcome Richard Snow. [APPLAUSE]
• [00:02:38.35] RICHARD SNOW: Well hello, and thank you very much for coming. I'm very glad to be here. I have been already given the terrifying information that there's a Ford expert in the audience. So I very much hope the Ford expert will show leniency.
• [00:03:01.93] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [00:03:02.77] RICHARD SNOW: Oh, well that's OK. Then they'll be at each other's throats. That's fine. I have just finished a book about Henry Ford, so course I had to spend several years with them. And they have to me been extremely interesting years.
• [00:03:26.48] Henry Ford is among the strangest and in some ways the least appealing of great men. He hated cows. He declared in absolute seriousness, the cow must go.
• [00:03:41.74] He believed Jew-- he was probably the only person in the world who believed this-- he believed the Jews had invented jazz as part of a race-wide campaign to corrupt and then dominate America. He became obsessed with soybeans late in his life when he had enough clout to make a dinner party of 20 or 30 people sit down to a meal that began with soybean appetizers and passed on to soybean cutlets to end with soybean ice cream on soybean pie and soybean coffee.
• [00:04:10.53] He was always litigious. And when the Chicago Tribune called him an ignored anarchist in 1919 he sued and made the bad mistake of not suing just for being called an anarchist-- which had already been pretty firmly established as being a libel-- but for the ignorant too. And he'd already famously said that history was bunk, that had been in the newspapers.
• [00:04:38.12] And so he found himself on the stand being interviewed about his knowledge of American history and it was pretty grisly. Mr. Ford, have you ever heard of Benedict Arnold? Yes I have. And who was he? I believe he was a writer.
• [00:04:54.38] Did we have a revolution in America? Yes, I believe we did. When would that have been? 1812. I mean, it went on like that and it went on like that for days.
• [00:05:04.62] And Ford pretended not to mind being made an object of derision but he did mind. And he spent a great deal of the latter part of his life building on some empty acreage in Dearborn, Michigan a vast museum devoted to American history. Now, I don't think I have to tell any of you here that it's a wonderful museum. It's an endlessly fascinating place.
• [00:05:31.89] Ford collected on the grandest possible scale. He revered Thomas Edison all his life. I don't think he admired any living person more. And he brought Edison's laboratory up from Menlo Park, New Jersey along with them rooming house that Edison's assists had lived in and seven car loads of New Jersey dirt so the buildings could literally sit on their native soil.
• [00:06:03.22] And when he went to get the Wright Brother's cycle shop he also brought the pretty little Queen Anne house that the brothers had grown up in. And it was wooden. The building stood on a stone foundation. He had the mortar knocked out between the stones and re-ground so it would be on its same cement.
• [00:06:23.19] This tells a good deal about his immense capacity for taking pains. The whole museum tells a lot about the man. It's like walking through Henry Ford's brain, and that's a very interesting place to be. He loved mechanisms of all kind. He loved watches.
• [00:06:43.14] So in the village there are three watchmakers but there's no attorney's offices, there's no nice little country bank. Because he thought lawyers and bankers were all leeches. And there's something else about that place I felt. When Ford was a young man and all the time he was working to establish himself, he had a magical ability to draw people to him, to trust him, to make them work for him and do it happily.
• [00:07:14.93] One of his early friends call that "the magnet." He said, oh, that's Henry. He's got the magnet. And I felt a dim tug of that magnet's pull all the time I was in his museum. And that's what made me want to write a book about him.
• [00:07:35.19] But of course, I started the book with considerable trepidation. Probably only Abraham Lincoln has been written more about than Henry Ford. And this wasn't helped when I told a friend what I was going to be writing about and he said, isn't that story about as well known as the nativity?
• [00:07:55.35] Well that's certainly what I'd been worried about. But after I'd spent a while with him I began thinking that maybe the story wasn't all so well known after all. Or actually, rather that it was so well known that we don't even realize it was his story.
• [00:08:12.18] What I mean is that everybody knows the name and the comment about history being made, and that he built a lot of cars. But the truth breadth of his accomplishment is now so much a part of the world we inhabit that his influence is around us like the air we breathe, and as invisible. Every century or so our republic has been remade by a new technology. 170 years ago it was the railroad and in our time it's the microprocessor.
• [00:08:44.94] These technologies do more than change our habits. They changed the way we think. Thoreau who saw the railroads come in, listening to the trains steaming past Walden Pond wrote, "have not men improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was invented? Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than ever they did in the stage office?" And of course, anyone over the age of 20, younger than that, simply your environment knows what the computer and the internet are doing now.
• [00:09:16.80] Well, in between the steam locomotive and the Mac came Henry Ford's Model T. And when Ford was quite elderly he was speaking with a Dearborn high school boy who was doing an article on him for the high school newspaper. And Ford got very sentimental about the one room schoolhouse, and square dancing, and started to talk about how wonderful these old days were.
• [00:09:46.80] And the boy wasn't an easy sell on this. And he said, well that's all very well, Mr. Ford. But we live in the modern age. Ford said, young man, don't tell me about the modern age. I invented the modern age.
• [00:10:09.06] Now, you'll notice he didn't say, I made a hell of a lot of cars. He said basically he had fashioned the world he and the boy were living in. And it's a crazy, preposterous, megalomaniac claim. And I've come to think it's very largely true.
• [00:10:30.02] Now perhaps the strangest thing of all about this strange man is that his life seems divided almost in half. For the first half he seems to have been a genuinely fine person. And for the second half, quite a terrible one. And the change seems to have taken place in not much more than a year or so.
• [00:10:49.56] I have some ideas about why this might have happened. But at the bottom, there is a mystery to him. Certainly, his close associates felt so. Almost every one of his high lieutenants, it's interesting reading them.
• [00:11:01.20] One after another they all say, well, we worked on this and we were very close on that, but I never really understood him. I never understood Mr. Ford. Nobody called him Henry. The Reverend Samuel Marquis who spent years working with Ford wrote, "in spite of a long and fairly intimate acquaintance with him, I have not one mental picture of which I can say, this is the man as he is or as I know him. There are in him lights so high and shadows so deep that I cannot get the whole of him in proper focus at the same time."
• [00:11:38.67] A reporter who met him in 1915 was harsher about this duality of nature, "There's the fascinating little illusory trick which may be played with one of the Ford portrait photographs. If one side of Ford's face is covered a benign gently humorous expression dominates. When the other side is covered the look is transformed into one of deadly, malevolent calculation. This ambiguous effect is created by Ford's heavy, hollow eyes, the pale eyes one would associate with a visionary or a killer."
• [00:12:15.97] Visionary and killer. Ford was full of contradictions right from the very start. A farmer who hated farming. But he became one of a handful of the world's most successful capitalists, a capitalist who hated capitalism. Well, whatever his mysteries, by the time that reporter wrote that in 1915, a great many people were trying to figure him out.
• [00:12:40.80] He was on his way to becoming the richest American. And once Theodore Roosevelt died in 1919, he was easily the most famous. Now, this man who lived to read about the atomic bombs falling on Japan was born three weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1863 on a farm in Dearborn. His father had been born on an Irish tenant farm and he always seems to have felt grateful surprise that he now owned not only a farm of his own but a prosperous one.
• [00:13:18.03] Henry felt a little differently. He loved everything about the farm except the farming. He said, "my earliest recollection is that, considering the results, there was too much work on the place. That is the way I still feel about farming." There are clouds of folklore about Ford's boyhood, a lot of them sent up by Ford himself. But it does seem clear that he was very early interested in shifting onto machinery burdens that people had born since biblical times.
• [00:13:51.54] He said, "even when I was very young I suspected that farm work might somehow be done in a better way. That is what took me into mechanics, although my mother always said I was a born mechanic." He very early began taking things apart to see how they would work. And he always got them back together, but what he took apart and got back together often ran better.
• [00:14:18.38] A neighbor said that every clock in the Ford household shuddered when it saw it coming. But he did more harm than good with the clocks. And by the time he was 12, he was repairing neighbors' watches. Now, the next year when he was 13 his mother died. And he expressed the loss in the best way he knew how. He said, "the house was like a watch without a mainspring."
• [00:14:44.16] And it was perhaps the nearness of her death that made him particularly sensitive to the impact of what he called "the most important, biggest event of my early years." His father was driving him into town in his wagon, the family wagon, when they came upon a steam farm engine moving their way. Here is how clearly Ford described it 60 years later. "I remember that engine as though I had seen it only yesterday, for it was the first vehicle other than horse drawn that I'd ever seen. It was intended primarily for driving threshing machines and sawmills, and was simply a portable engine and boiler mounted on wheels.
• [00:15:24.79] I had seen plenty of these engines hauled around my horses, but this one had a chain that made a connection between the engine and the rear wheels. The engineer was very glad to explain the whole affair. He was proud of it. He showed me how the chain was disconnected from the propelling wheel a the belt put on to drive the machinery. He told me that the engine made 200 revolutions a minute and that the chain pinion could be shifted to let the wagon stop while the engine was still running."
• [00:15:53.05] And here Ford, so much of who's early youth this allusive, makes a clear and plausible statement of the moment his life took a course that would change everyone else's. "This last"-- he means the engine running in neutral while not driving the wagon-- "is a feature which is incorporated into modern automobiles. It was not important with steam engines which are easily stopped and started. But it became very important with the gasoline engine. It was that engine which took me into automotive transportation."
• [00:16:26.57] Ford followed that farm engine for the rest of his life. "My toys were all tools," he wrote when he was in his 60's. He added, "and they still are." But of course, as a teenager he had to learn to use those tools. And he couldn't have found himself in a better place to do that.
• [00:16:44.53] Detroit had standing timber all around. There was lake shipping. There was iron ore. And the city took advantage of all of this. When Henry Ford turned 17 and left home to go there, it already had 120,000 residents, 10 railroads feeding it. And it was home to 1,000 different manufacturing businesses, little machine shops scattered everywhere.
• [00:17:09.74] Ford spent a few months in business school there. And that was the only time in his life when his handwriting was legible. But his real education came from the machine shops. He held jobs in several of them and impressed everyone he worked with. He had an almost instinctive sense of machinery. Even at the end of his life he could look at 10 identical carburetors laid out on a bench and point to the one that had something wrong with it.
• [00:17:38.00] He loved being among machines. But a few years later he was back in Dearborn on the farm. He'd been lured there by his father with the promise of 40 acres of land-- 80 acres-- and his father still hoped Henry would become a farmer too. Ford didn't want the farmland, but he went because he did want to be perceived as a more stable citizen. And the reason he cared about that was because he'd fallen in love with an 18-year-old named Clara Bryant.
• [00:18:07.85] He'd met her at a New Year's Eve dance. He loved dancing all his life. He married her in 1888, and she turned out to be a great choice. She was steady, and staunch, and brave, and had such complete faith in him that he took to calling her "the great believer." And being married to Henry can't have been easy for her at first because over the next 10 years they lived in 10 rental houses.
• [00:18:32.57] And all during that time Ford was experimenting with creating a machine that would do what the steam traction engine had which was drive itself. He knew all about steam engines by now and decided they were simply too heavy to power what he had in mind. So he began to look at gasoline and the internal combustion engine. He started building a car in the woodshed behind his rented house.
• [00:18:57.70] A woodshed makes it sound like too modest a thing. It was actually a rather substantial little brick building. You can see a replica of it today in Greenfield Village. It was a lonely and frustrating job because everything had to be built from scratch. When Ford needed a carburetor he had to invent one. He didn't even have a name for it, the word hadn't come into the language yet.
• [00:19:22.31] And he worked on his first car for months and felt it was finally ready in June of 1896. And it gives a good idea of the intensity of purpose with which he-- concentration with which he worked-- that it was only when he was ready to take it out on its trial run that he discovered it was too big to fit through the woodshed door. Well he fixed that with an axe, and got his car started, and coaxed its two cylinder engine into life, and drove off into his future and ours.
• [00:19:54.15] The car worked, and he improved it, and finally got it running well enough to convince a Detroit lumber tycoon to finance what Ford called "the Detroit Automobile Company." And I think it's worth remembering how courageous it was to stake everything on building automobiles in those days. Years later Ford said a very interesting thing about it. He said, "of course there was no demand for an automobile. There never is for a new product."
• [00:20:23.99] And that runs totally counter to the old saw about necessity being the mother of invention. And very often it's exactly the other way around. Invention being the mother of necessity is-- nobody wanted an iPhone until they had one in their hand. Anyway, Ford got his company started and seems instantly to have lost interest in it. Just wandered away, wouldn't show up.
• [00:20:53.20] Nobody knows why. Perhaps he wasn't quite ready to manufacture cars. More likely, he resented working for anybody. He never liked having a boss. And said something that he then went on to ruin a second company and he was still able, for a third throw of the dice, to find a circle-- smaller, but a real circle of investors-- for his next enterprise which he founded in 1903 with $28,000 capital paid in.
• [00:21:24.82] This one bore his own name, the Ford Motor Company. And it would last. Now his investors, not unreasonably, wanted the Ford Motor Company to build expensive cars. In 1907 the Packard Gray Wolf sports car-- though that term wouldn't exist for another 40 years-- cost $10,000. And a nice suburban house might go for $1,800. No, work that calculation out today and if prices had stayed relative the house would cost maybe $1.2 million and the Dodge Viper would cost $6 million.
• [00:21:59.90] So of course it was more desirable a sell something worth thousands of dollars than something worth hundreds of dollars. Ford believed exactly the opposite. Make the car cheaper, you'll do better selling lots of low priced cars to farmers and shop clerks than you will a few costly ones to billionaires. And the way to achieve this-- he told one of the backers of his new company-- is to make one automobile like another automobile, just as one pin is like another pin when it comes from a pin factory. Or a match like another match when it comes from a match factory.
• [00:22:38.18] But how to do it? How to do it? The car should be simple and durable, useful to farmers. Ford might have hated farming but he loved the farm life, or rather the virtues of loyalty and steadiness, order, that he saw in it. The car would be fundamental enough for any farm boy to understand and repair, rugged enough to negotiate with truly dreadful roads of the time, versatile enough to be hooked up to a band saw, or a thresher, or a pump.
• [00:23:04.93] Now, by 1904 he was a success. But he saw hidden inside every car he built the ghost of a much greater car. And in 1908 he called together his most trusted executives and start designing one in a sealed off room in his factory. And here his genius played as strongly and steadily as it ever would. And his inherent contradictions deployed themselves only to a creative end.
• [00:23:34.65] A contradiction because the car he was building would be at once as perfectly simple as he could make it and yet immensely sophisticated. It would, for instance, have four cylinders when no inexpensive car had more than two. And the engines in multi cylinder cars tended just to be bundles of thick-walled pipes bolted and strapped together. Fussy, complicated, hard to repair, hard to maintain.
• [00:23:59.52] Ford wanted his engine machine out of a single block of metal. And while his helpers were trying to figure out how to do this, Ford had another thought. Slice off the top. That is, have the engine in a single casting with its four cylinders, wholly accessible.
• [00:24:16.95] And then fit the cylinder head on top of it like a hat and bolt that down. And that's how car engines are built to this day. The steering wheel in American cars, in all cars, was almost always on the right. Ancient tradition on that because the steam locomotive engineer sat head in, right hand in his cabin. Ford thought it belonged on the left. Put it there and there it stays unless you're English.
• [00:24:47.19] The materials and the body would be cheap as he could make them, but the chassis would be made of vanadium steel which was a light, tough, very expensive alloy quite new to the United States. And he'd run through the alphabet from his first Model A and now was currently selling the Model S. So he named the new car the Model T and put it on the market in October of 1908.
• [00:25:11.13] Now, the Model T is no longer any sort of force in our lives, but I think it refuses to look placid, or quaint, or to acquire that gloss of appeal that time puts on so many ugly things. And that high and lovely frame and pugnacious snout still flaunt the box antique's power to change the world. The car was tall because the ruts were deep.
• [00:25:37.60] Thanks in part to the vanadium steel it was both tough and light, only 1,100 pounds. And it could scramble over marshy terrain that would mobilize heavier cars. For what became so ubiquitous an American fixture it had many eccentricities, beginning with what Ford called a planetary transmission. A collector friend of mine who owns a Model T told me once that he could leave it parked anywhere. Nobody would ever steal it because nobody could figure out how to drive it.
• [00:26:05.21] So the three pedals sprouted from the floor. The one on the right was the break, the one in the middle put the car into reverse, the one on the left made it go forward in low gear when pressed to the floor and in high gear when released.
• [00:26:21.84] The driving gears were all engaged by bands that these pedals either tightened or loosened. But with all those pedals on the floor, not one was an accelerator. That was a lever on the steering wheel which you thumbed downward to feed more gas to the engine. And when you wanted to know how much more gas you had left to feed, you stopped, climbed out, lifted off the front seat cushion, unscrewed the gas cap beneath it, and poked in the tank with a wooden stick marked like a ruler but with gallons instead of inches.
• [00:26:54.14] But for all the fussing the car required, it went. It went and it was as dependable as a cast iron stove. Ford liked to tell everybody a joke. He told it to President Wilson when he met him, about the farmer making out a will instructing his lawyer to have him buried in his Model T. And naturally the lawyer wanted to know the reason for this. And the man said, because I ain't been a hole yet that it couldn't get me out of.
• [00:27:25.30] And when it was time to stay put and do some farm work you could take off a rear wheel and hook it up to a thresher or sawmill. But the owner was expected to know how to do that, and indeed to maintain the car generally. A midwestern man named Alfred Stevenson who owned a succession of Model Ts in the '20s wrote about this.
• [00:27:43.50] He said, "the whole car was simple, accessible. In the evening you could tighten the bands, look at the timer, or clean the plugs. A weekend would do nicely to realign the bands or grind the valves, clean the carbon, or maybe tighten the rods. A four day vacation was plenty to overhaul the engine or the rear end. If any of these jobs was a bit beyond your experience you had merely to ask your neighbor, who not only knew but would come over and help."
• [00:28:11.45] The ramifications of this were far reaching and frequently unexpected. In the Second World War, for example, German tanks were often superior to their American counterparts. But that advantage was canceled by how quickly a disabled Sherman could get itself repaired and back into action. And the Germans were baffled and dismayed to find that among his many other accomplishments, Henry Ford had created a whole generation of mechanics.
• [00:28:42.40] But perhaps the Model T's most profound impact, what made it the single most significant automobile ever built, was social. In 1918 a Georgia farm wife wrote Henry Ford, "your car lifted us out of the mud. It brought joy into our lives." The Model T broke the age old isolation of the farm in less than a decade. And wherever it went it spun out behind it a new civilization of highways and roadside fixtures like motels and of course gas stations. And a new way of thinking about space and time.
• [00:29:20.72] In the 1930s John Steinbeck looked back with a sort of sardonic and what it had done in just half of his lifetime. He said, "someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and aesthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars.
• [00:29:49.17] With the Model T part of the concept of private property disappeared. Pliers ceased to be privately owned and the tire pump belonged to the last man who picked it up. Most of the babies in the period were conceived in Model T Fords and not a few were born in them. The theory of the Anglo-Saxon home became so warped that it never quite recovered."
• [00:30:10.36] Now, of course the Model T could never have had such an effect had it not been deployed in enormous numbers. And this even more than the car itself is the measure of Ford's genius. A number of car companies were turning out 100 cars a day during the Model T's early years. And that demonstrates very impressive capacities of manufacture.
• [00:30:33.89] But there's a fundamental difference between quantity production and mass production. And it was by inventing the latter that Ford invented the modern age. The Model T was a success, Ford could sell as many as he could make. And the way to make them, he believed, lay in precision and speed. Precision meant parts so scrupulously manufactured that one would always fit where it belonged without any time consuming shaping or filing.
• [00:31:00.79] Speed lay in breaking down the manufacturing process into ever smaller segments. This began in the spring of 1913 with the Magneto, which generated the electricity to fire the plugs. It took a worker 20 minutes to assemble one when one worker put it together. Put another together.
• [00:31:21.61] Ford separated the process into 29 steps. And rather than one worker doing 29 things, 29 workers would do one thing as the parts moved past their stations on what was the first modern assembly line. And when he got that going it took-- before it had taken 20 minutes, now it took 13 minutes.
• [00:31:45.93] So with the engine, then the transmission, then the upholstery. The axles and the radiators. Finally the whole car itself. "Always," Ford said, "bring the work to the man, not the man to the work."
• [00:31:57.97] When Ford first unveiled his Model T it took 12 and 1/2 hours to make one. A little more than a decade later it took exactly a minute. Before the Model T was done a car was coming off the line every 10 seconds. Ford made his millionth Model T in 1915, his 2 millionth in 1917, and so on for a while. A million cars a year and then in the early '20s two million.
• [00:32:21.99] And he always lowered the price. He flew directly in the face of all principles of monopoly capitalism which, of course, hold that if you have a desirable item that you alone own and other people want, you raise the price. Not Ford. He said, every time I shave a dollar off the price I gained 1,000 new customers.
• [00:32:43.81] So the car had begun at $850 and ended two decades later at $295. In 1909 the company made a profit of $220.11 on each car. With the moving assembly line up and running the profit fell to $99.34 and that was fine with Ford. And then in 1914 he announced that he was raising the base pay in his shop to $5 a day.
• [00:33:10.76] This was twice the going rate for industrial work and it caused a sensation. Ford's workers became his customers. No man who bolted together a Packard Gray Wolf could ever own one. Every Ford worker who wanted to could own a Ford. So Ford also created a modern cycle of consumerism in which we still live.
• [00:33:35.22] But all during this time of consolidating his achievements he became restless and increasingly mean spirited. And he demonstrated this in many ways. By firing longtime colleagues and refusing to tell them why. Or to tell them at all, just having their desks taken away in the middle of the night.
• [00:33:55.92] But this new character trait was put on most spectacular display when in 1919 he bought a newspaper called the Dearborn Independent. Now, this is a wholly innocuous little local paper. But Ford had a message he wanted to get out.
• [00:34:12.31] Now, you know that for every big complicated problem there is one simple solution and it's always wrong. Ford decided that the worst evils of the modern world, war, financial calamities, everything but the plague, were caused by the Jews. And he used the Independent to spread the word. for nearly 100 consecutive issues he ran headlines denouncing them.
• [00:34:39.59] His agents were horrified and begged him to stop, he wouldn't. His stubbornness and myopia are amazingly. He had become very good friends with the Rabbi Franklin who was the chief reformed rabbi of Detroit. And such good friends, in fact, that every year he sent him a new Model T to replace the old one.
• [00:34:59.33] And after he'd started his work on the Dearborn Idependent the rabbi sent the car back. Ford was horrified. He couldn't believe it. He called him up and said, what's the matter, Rabbi Franklin? Have I done something to offend you?
• [00:35:15.12] He explained that good Jews should be grateful for the information he was providing. He was on his way too proving that a Jewish conspiracy had been behind the Lincoln assassination. When I told a friend of mine about that theory he said, oh yes, Booth's Broadway associates. A lawsuit finally put a stop to that.
• [00:35:45.36] But Ford spread his new unpleasantness closer to home. Henry and Clara had one son, Edsel. And he grew up to have nearly as good a sense of cars his father did. Everyone in the Ford shops thought he was great which isn't always the case with the bosses' son. But the more capable he became the harsher his father was with him.
• [00:36:08.17] Partly this is a difference of generations. Edsel had grown up in entirely different surroundings than Ford had. Ford was a teetotaller, Edsel liked to have a drink with friends. And the friends were largely in Grosse Point, which was a home of privilege that Ford didn't cotton to, he never left Dearborn.
• [00:36:31.08] Once while his son was away for a weekend he went into his house and smashed every liquor bottle there. And he liked to humiliate Edsel publicly. One time Edsel thought he had his father's permission to build a six cylinder engine. And he got it perfected and one of Ford's executives told what happened next.
• [00:36:51.08] Ford called the man one day and told him, come over right away. He'd built a new scrap conveyor, the highest one in the plant, and was about to give it a trial run. And when the man got to the top of the conveyor he found Edsel there with a bunch of other executives. Henry signaled for the conveyor to start and the first thing to come up it was Edsel's new engine.
• [00:37:12.37] It's got to the top and fell into the junk pile. And Ford shook Edsel and yelled, don't you ever do anything like that again. Why this venom? I think that elevator story holds a clue. Of course Edsel wanted that engine to go in a new car someday. And that car would not be a Model T.
• [00:37:32.10] More than any inventor I can think of, Ford associated himself with his greatest creation. The Model T was more than a car to him. It was a moral force. And by the mid '20s it had transformed the country.
• [00:37:46.20] But part of that transformation was that a new generation of car makers, like Alfred Sloan over at General Motors, were seeing the car not only as a utilitarian necessity but as an object of desire. And Edsel was one of them. He knew the Model T was getting outdated.
• [00:38:04.26] And sales were dropping. Chevrolet had come along. And for not much more than a T cost you could get a larger, smoother car with a gas tank in the back and a floor mounted gear shift, and an accelerator you stepped on rather than twiddling a little lever on the steering wheel.
• [00:38:21.76] Well, Ford held out as long as he could, getting angrier and more arbitrary all the time. And at the same time weirdly jealous of this lieutenants who he one by one, all the people he was close to he drove out. Most catastrophically for him, the very talented William Knudsen who went over to General Motors and took charge of the Chevrolet division there.
• [00:38:50.66] But for all of his flailing he couldn't hold out. And in the end he had to give it up. The last Model T came off the line probably six or seven years later than it should have in 1927. Ford had made 15 and 1/2 million of them. And when production ceased there were more than 11 million still on the road.
• [00:39:14.68] And of course there was tremendous interest in what Ford would do to follow the Model T. In fact, next to Lindbergh's flight it was the biggest story of 1927. Car sales dropped everywhere in a boom time as people waited to see what was coming.
• [00:39:33.47] It took the factory, of course, several months to retool. And when the new car-- Ford had started over fresh by calling it the Model A-- was announced that December, the New York World said, the excitement could hardly have been greater had Pawa, the sacred white elephant of Burma, elected to sit for seven days on the flag pole of the Woolworth Building.
• [00:39:54.19] And in a way the Model A was worth the wait. It was a thoroughly modern car. It still looks handsome just the way this Model T still looks ugly. It's sold well, 800,000 in its first year. But Chevrolet sold a million that same year. And the Ford Motor Company would never again be making one out of every two cars on the American road.
• [00:40:16.96] Did Henry care? It's hard to say. After the Model T his interests became more and more fragmented except for Greenfield Village. And his shop went from being the most benevolent in Detroit to a place run by thugs. Ford became a tyrant, and by the late 1930s the workers were saying very quietly to one another a joke, who invented the Gestapo, Adolf or Henry?
• [00:40:51.06] When Ford died in 1947, perhaps the saddest result of this change in his temperament was that his son Edsel had deceased him by five years. He had leaned on the boy and leaned on the boy. Edsel had developed stomach cancer, but oddly enough what may have been the final blow was a bilious fever given him by milk on the Ford farms. Ford may have hated a cow but he wouldn't permit his milk to be pasteurized.
• [00:41:25.60] In any event, that was Henry Ford. How really to assess the true impact of this man? It may still be too early. We're certainly still immersed in the modern world he created.
• [00:41:44.88] I think Will Rogers many years ago came pretty close when he said to Henry Ford with none of his usual folksiness, "it may take 100 years the tell whether you hurt us more than you helped us. But you certainly didn't leave us where you found us." Thank you.
• [00:42:15.11] TIM GRIMES: So I'll just come around if there's a question. So hang on, I'll come right up here.
• [00:42:21.27] AUDIENCE: My first question, well my only question-- we did this before. I was born in the early '30s. My grandfather had a farm and loved Henry Ford very much up north in a little town named Farwell north of Claire.
• [00:42:37.15] My question to you is, we used to go up every summer. They had 10 kids. And all the aunts and uncles and kids, we gathered up there and collected all the stuff and canned all summer.
• [00:42:48.56] But he had an old Model T. And he would keep it down in the barn where it was safe. My question is, when we would go to town on Saturday, we got to ride in the back and we used to call it a rumble seat. Was there a kind of a thing in the back of those old Fords?
• [00:43:10.68] RICHARD SNOW: Yes, but I don't-- maybe the last models-- a rumble seat is a sort of specific thing. It's in the back of the car and you actually lift it out. And it's like a--
• [00:43:22.71] AUDIENCE: Right.
• [00:43:23.59] RICHARD SNOW: Was that what that was?
• [00:43:24.35] AUDIENCE: Yeah, I think it was.
• [00:43:26.53] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [00:43:28.30] RICHARD SNOW: I think that would have been a Model A though.
• [00:43:30.22] AUDIENCE: Oh OK. I don't remember that.
• [00:43:32.67] TIM GRIMES: I think it was the successor to the Model T that had the rumble seat. Although there was an entire industry that made after parts for the Ford market. And I think it's certainly possible that one of them might have made a-- they made whole bodies that you could put over your Model T. And one of them might have had a rumble seat.
• [00:43:55.02] AUDIENCE: Down in the city archives have that. So that was a treat when we went up north and got to ride in the rumble seat.
• [00:44:02.93] TIM GRIMES: OK, we have another question right here.
• [00:44:06.21] AUDIENCE: You mentioned something about Ford, I think, hating capitalism. can you give some other examples about how that would be expressed? Well, just more as it affected him quite personally in that as soon as he'd gotten backers to invest in his company he call them, literally, called them parasites.
• [00:44:32.85] He said that what they and others like them did was leach off the energies and efforts of people who really created things. And he made some rather, well, slightly sleazy maneuvers to get rid of them. For instance he announced at one point that he'd given up on the Model T and was going to build a much better car that cost half as much. And then he had agents going around not under his name trying to buy up stock.
• [00:45:06.77] He was a consolidator and he wanted to consolidate things around himself. On some fundamental level he felt that drawing an income from an initial investment in an enterprise once the enterprise had succeeded was slightly immoral. And pretty much said that.
• [00:45:31.91] TIM GRIMES: So another question. Aha, I'm going to go right here and then there.
• [00:45:37.76] AUDIENCE: More of a comment. But like your response, back in the late '60s a friend of mine whom had moved here from New York got a kick out of the people around Detroit. They wouldn't say Ford Motor Company or Ford. It was always Ford's, like it was some kind of member of the family or a Harry's general store kind of thing.
• [00:45:57.47] RICHARD SNOW: Oh, like McDonald's.
• [00:45:58.26] AUDIENCE: Yeah.
• [00:45:59.65] RICHARD SNOW: That's interesting. Like they say, I worked at Ford's?
• [00:46:03.65] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [00:46:05.63] RICHARD SNOW: Wow. That's very interesting. I never heard that.
• [00:46:10.27] TIM GRIMES: OK, we have a question right here.
• [00:46:12.85] AUDIENCE: Off the subject a little bit. You said there was a very dramatic and sudden change in his character. Was there any indication of any health status change?
• [00:46:24.39] RICHARD SNOW: That's a good question.
• [00:46:26.45] AUDIENCE: Like his thyroid or anything?
• [00:46:31.92] RICHARD SNOW: He was eccentric sometimes. Like he'd go on a soybean kick and everything. But basically he was extremely healthy.
• [00:46:41.76] He loved to run. He kept himself in extraordinarily good shape. When he was in his 60s and 70s he astounded people at how quickly would leap out of a car. A friend of his said, that man is built of springs.
• [00:47:01.61] He seemed to be in fine physical health throughout. He had a series of strokes much later in his life. But I don't think-- I think he was in good health at least when he. Because it was as early as 1919 that he started turning out the Dearborn Independent.
• [00:47:28.04] I think that was more he'd had several things in public that had annoyed and humiliated him. And no, I think it was more kind of vanity and paranoia that was ignited in some way.
• [00:47:48.24] AUDIENCE: I would make a couple of comments about that. And that is that I do think that the major impacts at that time were number one, the World War I. And that affected everybody profoundly. It was a terrible thing.
• [00:48:03.04] And Ford, of course, tried to do his peace ship. And the vitriolic cynicism with which people greeted this very naive move on his part deeply, , deeply hurt him. And that I think was the major impact.
• [00:48:20.00] The other thing that happened was, after the $5 day his house was besieged. And he had suddenly become-- I think it was the example. Somebody once made the comment and said, if you want to try fame and fortune I suggest you try fortune without the fame.
• [00:48:36.69] I think the fame was something he was absolutely unprepared to have happen. And I think that you very aptly described him as an immensely complex individual. There's no question about that. And I think that the naivety of a person that had grown up in a farm background was hit by this public on the one hand public adulation, on the other hand public cynicism, that came at that time. And I think that more than anything else turned him in that direction.
• [00:49:10.98] RICHARD SNOW: Yes, I think that's very true. It was the first time he'd gotten bad press. Because before that he'd become quite a public hero. I didn't have time to talk about this because it's sort of complicated.
• [00:49:26.21] But very briefly, in 1879, a Rochester patent attorney named George Selden look at a gasoline engine and thought hey, this could make a wagon go. And drafted a patent, said that it would be attached to the wheels of the car-- though he didn't say how that would happen-- and sent in into the patent office. But in those days you can put off a patent for 17 years by making tiny modifications to your wording and stuff. And he kept it alive basically until the automobile was becoming a feasible thing.
• [00:50:15.97] And then, incredibly, he got a patent on the idea of the automobile. And he got money backing him and started to exact ransom from all the car makers, even the young General Motors finally rolled over. And only Ford fought on, fought him alone.
• [00:50:35.93] Patent litigation was extremely expensive. Ford was spending $2 a car on it. But he stuck it out right until the end of he won. And there he actually got headlines that read things like "God bless Henry Ford." And so sure when just a few years later that the peace ship-- the criticism of the peace ship softened. It went from being, this is ridiculous, wow presumptuous, to by the time he was home there was sort of a counterraction to that.
• [00:51:12.67] And a lot of the press was saying, well, look at least he tried to do something. What have you done, buddy? But then he got involved-- I think the Chicago Tribune lawsuit stung him more deeply. Although that, if it did, had the very nice outcome of him showing everybody that he did know a lot about history and leaving that magnificent museum behind, that if was in any way a response to that.
• [00:51:47.36] AUDIENCE: I want to say thank you. I enjoyed your character description. I look forward to reading your book.
• [00:51:51.91] RICHARD SNOW: Well, thank you very much.
• [00:51:55.66] AUDIENCE: I've read some history on Henry and the doubling of the daily wage to $5. The history segments that I've found indicate that people walked out of his assembly line in 1913. They refused to work it. So he circulated fliers outside of the carriage building community to get people to come and work on his assembly line.
• [00:52:20.44] RICHARD SNOW: He was just-- once he had worked out this magically effective assembly line, his workers, they hate it. There was a certain cutting away of basic pride. And somebody who knew how to make a complicated device and now was asked to put this nut on that bolt and turn it a quarter of a turn and do that forever.
• [00:52:48.67] And certainly, part of the $5 day was in hopes to stop what had become a terrific turnover in the workforce at his plant. He understood that it would be big news. I don't think he'd quite prepared for the astonishing response it got.
• [00:53:16.55] People came in from all over the country. And in fact, he finally had to discourage them by saying he would only hire people who had lived in or around Detroit for, I think, two years or more. But it certainly.
• [00:53:33.96] AUDIENCE: Richard, he made a lot of money in his early days too, I think, with those investments, didn't he? There's a name that's familiar in Ann Arbor that maybe you ran into, Horace Rackham who I think did his original legal work for him for Ford stock. Is that correct? Do you remember that?
• [00:53:57.75] RICHARD SNOW: Yes, there was Rackham and-- yes.
• [00:54:02.54] AUDIENCE: And Rackham made a lot of money, didn't he?
• [00:54:04.45] RICHARD SNOW: Oh yes. He would try very, very sly maneuvers to get his stock back. But he didn't cheat anybody out of their just gains. Yeah, and a lot of people, there are a lot of wistful little stories. Because in the beginning when he couldn't pay wages he offered quite a few of them, look, just stay with me for a year and I'll pay you in stock. And every one of them would have become a millionaire.
• [00:54:47.12] His tremendously effective lieutenant, the terrifying James Couzen talked his sister-- and she was a schoolteacher. And he had right from the start absolute faith in Ford. And when he was getting something together he talked his sister into, she was a schoolteacher and she had saved $200.
• [00:55:11.24] And he talked her into investing it in Ford. Well, she didn't feel she could do it all. But she put in $100 and a very few years later got back I think $650,000 on that investment.
• [00:55:26.28] AUDIENCE: Just a small item to correct you with our Michigan accept. We say James "Cousins".
• [00:55:33.69] RICHARD SNOW: I never heard the name pronounced. Is that right, was it "Cousins?" Pronounced like "Cousins."
• [00:55:37.65] AUDIENCE: Became senator, I think, US senator.
• [00:55:39.42] RICHARD SNOW: Yes, he did indeed. He had a falling out with Henry quite early over the first World War. Ford was an absolutely sincere and dedicated pacifist. And as with most of his opinions was none too quiet about it.
• [00:55:55.69] And he said that the American soldier's uniform should have emblazoned over the right breast pocket murderer. And Couzens didn't feel that way, "Cousins," who was Canadian. And got very tired of hearing Ford quacking about this while his countrymen were dying on the Western Front. And that led to a finally a permanent rift between them.
• [00:56:26.70] But I think without Couzens, who was a great, great businessman, I think Ford wouldn't have gotten off the ground. His influence can't be underrated.
• [00:56:40.28] TIM GRIMES: We have another question back here.
• [00:56:41.73] RICHARD SNOW: Oh, sorry. No, we're going around with the mic. We'll be in the front in a second.
• [00:56:45.16] AUDIENCE: Thank you very much for coming. I really enjoyed it. For example, I think I got an inkling of what it must have been like to hear for the first time the word "automobile." Another example in terms of biggies of the 20th century, I had been used to placing Einstein and Edison on opposite poles, Edison being strictly trial and error without any theoretical understanding of what he was doing. Einstein-- not true?
• [00:57:15.79] AUDIENCE: Not true.
• [00:57:16.56] AUDIENCE: OK. Less than Einstein though. And Einstein doing what he did purely by thought. For example, his motivation for coming up with special relatively was to eliminate the logical contradiction between Newtonian mechanics and Maxwellian electromagnetism and all that.
• [00:57:36.13] I have two questions, one regarding history and one regarding--
• [00:57:41.24] RICHARD SNOW: I hope not quantum mechanics.
• [00:57:43.67] AUDIENCE: No, no actually. And one regarding Steve Jobs. The history is, we all know that Ford said history is bunk and all that. And that he had a very difficult time letting go of his Model T. Could it have been that he did not have a sense of the evolution of history or progress of history and he couldn't accept or didn't understand how the Model T would still be very important if it was no longer up to date? It would have its place in history.
• [00:58:17.04] And then the second question would be, based on all you've seen about Henry Ford and the political, economic, and cultural social effects of what his work did, how can we spot-- since change is always occurring-- how can we spot those changes that are occurring now that are really going to really, genuinely going to be historically revolutionary?
• [00:58:41.97] RICHARD SNOW: Who knows? I mean, some people have the vision to grab it. I never thought that Amazon would work. I'm the last person to have a predictive mind. I'm sure I would've thought the automobile was a noisy, inconvenient.
• [00:59:15.28] There's so much promising chaff. How do you?
• [00:59:20.37] AUDIENCE: What about Henry Ford and history, and his sense of history? And his inability to let go of the Model T versus saying that history is bunk?
• [00:59:28.36] RICHARD SNOW: Well actually, that history, what is not generally reported when he was on the stand about that was he was thinking about his own experiences and trying to design or think about weaponry for the first World War. Certainly this was not a project his heart was in. But he had said, look, how can any man basically about-- it was not a foolish thing. How can any man know basically about history?
• [01:00:00.37] In the beginning of the War we thought the zeppelins were going to cause a ruin of all English cities. Now our heavier than air engines are changing literally on a monthly basis. How can you track history with that? He was saying it's impossible to keep track of history because it changes so quickly. It's a molten subject, which is not foolish thought.
• [01:00:24.38] AUDIENCE: Why wouldn't he accept the change and the supercession of his Model T.
• [01:00:31.69] RICHARD SNOW: As I say, I think he thought it was an absolute moral force for good that stood outside of the common evolution of things. Certainly knew he'd then proved and-- it had represented a historic leap. But why he couldn't see-- I mean, he may not have-- also he may have felt, look, nobody gets to do something this amazing twice. From now on I can just build good automobiles, but I want to cling to the automobile that changed the world. I don't know.
• [01:01:10.38] TIM GRIMES: I have a question, a gentleman right up front here.
• [01:01:14.75] AUDIENCE: Mr. Snow, this is a difficult issue. But I would like you to explain the origin, how it developed, what it was based on in the virulent anti-semitism. And was there-- a followup-- was there some connection with his fascination for Adolf Hitler?
• [01:01:44.45] RICHARD SNOW: I think it was more Adolf Hitler's fascination for Ford. It's been traced to the McGuffeys Readers which had scenes from The Merchant of Venice. And there was undoubtedly more-- good Lord, heavens-- much more of a general atmosphere of anti-Semitism in those days than there is now. But Ford battoning onto it.
• [01:02:33.57] It seems somehow he loved to play a hunch. He was impulsive. But he was also entirely open to influence in things he didn't know anything about.
• [01:02:43.64] And I do think it might have been different if he hadn't had a highly competent accountant whom he trusted to handle his own personal finances named Lebold who was of German extraction. And was not only an anti-semite but an extremely proud anti-semite. And played into Ford's basic ignorant love of conspiracy theories, which Ford did like.
• [01:03:19.46] I don't think this was thought through. I don't think whatever Hitler went through himself-- it was some kind of process a maturing and incubating his ideas. I think it's entirely possible that Ford had two talks with Lebold and bought the newspaper and went to town.
• [01:03:39.25] But Neil Baldwin wrote a very, very good long look called Henry Ford and the Jews. He thinks it comes from McGuffeys Readers. I've read the McGuffey Readers.
• [01:03:56.53] I can't imagine them having-- I mean, as much as Ford admired them-- I can't imagine the single act of a single play having an effect as dramatic as that one turned out to be. I just don't know. I wish he'd decided to concentrate more on soybeans.
• [01:04:17.27] AUDIENCE: But you can't explain any deeper, how it developed, and how it originated and grew?
• [01:04:26.74] RICHARD SNOW: There's no early signs of him talking about it. It certainly doesn't seem to have been part of a general racism. During the great black diaspora up after the First World War up North to Detroit, the African Americans knew there were two shops, only two shots that were worth applying to. Packard might give you a job and Ford probably would give you a job.
• [01:04:56.83] And he actually had blacks running gangs whites with the power to fire them. Which I can't think of another American industry in 1924 where that would've applied at all. So it wasn't general racism, it was highly specific. And it's very hard to follow because then he ludicrously pretend he hadn't known what was being printed and was ashamed of it.
• [01:05:34.12] The whole thing is tangled. But as I say, I would be very much surprised if this was a thoughtful, sequential development of thoughts. If it was analogous to the care he put into figuring out how to build a working automobile. But I don't know.
• [01:05:54.23] TIM GRIMES: I think there's a gentleman here that-- do you have a comment on this, sir? Well, hang on just a moment.
• [01:05:59.72] AUDIENCE: I did know a graduate of his trade school.
• [01:06:04.18] RICHARD SNOW: Oh yes?
• [01:06:04.74] AUDIENCE: Yeah, his name was George Negri. And I think during World War II he became a bomber pilot. So he graduated before World War II.
• [01:06:12.76] But he made the comment to me what you said. No one called him Henry. But in his case he used to go to the chapel at the Ford museum and he ran into Henry Ford there so often that Ford started talking to him. And eventually Ford told him to call him Henry.
• [01:06:30.05] RICHARD SNOW: For heaven's sake.
• [01:06:31.24] AUDIENCE: So he's maybe the exception that proves the rule.
• [01:06:34.83] RICHARD SNOW: William Knudsen always called him Mr. Ford.
• [01:06:37.19] AUDIENCE: Well, I think it was an extremely different case of that. But he did make that point. He was a very interesting individual that I knew. And things he did afterwards were, he just talked about how things changed at General Motors when-- I can't think of the fellow that went to Europe eventually.
• [01:06:57.36] But he said General Motors used to pay on the dime twice a month. If you missed the first date on the month the check came within two weeks after you did file the second date. And he says after this guy took charge of General Motors he said that two weeks turned into three months sometimes.
• [01:07:20.02] AUDIENCE: I just wanted to make a comment that-- and I've been asked to try to prove this. But I did read somewhere that Ford never actually said history is bunk. What Ford said was all history as taught is more or less bunk. But I think you could learn far more about our history if we study plows.
• [01:07:44.62] When I went to the books on history to learn about plows or steam engines there was nothing. And so what Ford was an early example of a material culturalist. And that's why Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford museum is the way it is.
• [01:08:00.10] And he believed in history of the common person. And with reference to the anti-semitism you have to remember, in the late 19th century in this country, especially in rural parts of this country, anti-semitism was absolutely common. It was part of the condition of the land.
• [01:08:20.03] And I think it's quite possible that those early aspects of his life stayed with him a long time. McGuffey was part of this, of course, but it's only a part of it. And I think we forget that right after 1900 there was that absolutely salacious publication that was started by, I believe, the Russians about this conspiracy of Jews who take over the world, that kind of stuff. Protocols of-- yeah, exactly.
• [01:08:46.77] RICHARD SNOW: Elders of Zion. Yeah, it was invented by the Tzar's secret police.
• [01:08:50.62] AUDIENCE: Sure. And so the realities in that kind of environment, the thing that strikes me about Henry Ford more than anything else is an incredible genius with incredibly wonderful traits. But also incredibly naive. And I think it's that combination of the two that could get him into real trouble.
• [01:09:11.59] TIM GRIMES: OK, there was a gentleman up here that had his hand up a little bit ago. And we're going to have this be the last question, because we want to make sure we have time for the book signing. So this will be the last question, and then we'll invite everyone up for the books signing.
• [01:09:26.08] AUDIENCE: Could you say a little bit about where his pacifist feelings came from during this first World War? And what can you say about his religion? Did they come from his religion?
• [01:09:40.65] RICHARD SNOW: His religion is sort of interesting. He once said he was an Episcopalian but he didn't work at it. Then for a long time he said he believed and may indeed have believed in reincarnation. And in fact formulated a fairly plausible explanation of it.
• [01:10:03.51] He said that when cars first appeared on the roads chickens would run away ahead of them, hence be crushed. But after a few years the chicken would run off to the side and save its life. And then he said, that chicken had its ass kicked in another life. Although we could also have Darwinian reasons for this to happen.
• [01:10:35.37] Every now and then there's a gleam of harsh, sardonic humor out of him. And during a little bubble in the 1920s he became a great darling of preachers who would preach about how Ford's immaculate life and his fealty to the scriptures should be an example. And one gave a particularly fulsome sermon about how Ford kept scriptures in every room of his house so he would always have that wisdom to hand.
• [01:11:06.73] And the newspaper man went up to him after that and said, well, Mr. Ford, do you attend church regularly? And Ford said, nah, the last time I went somebody stole my car. So it's very hard to tell. He would sometimes say things that just popped into his head.
• [01:11:31.08] Although I think he had a sort of general unformed faith in the supreme being. But it allowed a lot of latitude and allowed him to ignore it for. And what was the other big thing?
• [01:11:50.10] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] pacifism came in.
• [01:11:50.40] RICHARD SNOW: His pacifism, it's speculated his mother, I believe, lost an older brother at Fredericksburg in the Civil War. And he always felt, unlike the anti-semitism, from a very early age he felt that the tremendous destructiveness of war was a blight and a crime. And he never ceased to believe that.
• [01:12:31.69] TIM GRIMES: OK, we want to thank everyone for coming.
• [01:12:33.76] RICHARD SNOW: Thank you all.
• [01:12:34.06] TIM GRIMES: Thank you, Richard
• [01:12:39.16] [MUSIC PLAYING]