The Last Billionaire - Henry Ford (Paperback)

THE LAST BILLIONAIRE HENRY FORD BY WILLIAM C. RICHARDS CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS - LTD . LONDON 1948 . K. 7TWTCTOT-7 670 VALUiY KOAO CITY, MO. COPYRIGHT, 1948, BY CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS The author wishes to express his profound thanks to a host of present and former Ford executives and newspapermen who were in position to study Mr. Ford at close range and in daily contact and who have contributed generously of their memories to this work. I V., Adventure is the vitaminizing element in histories. ... Its adepts are rarely chaste, or merdjul, or even law-abiding at all, and any moral peptonizing, or sugaring, ta es out the interest, with the truth, of their lives No, the adventurer is an individualist and an egotist, a truant from obligations. His road is solitary, there is no room for company on it. What he does, he does for himself. His motive may be simple greed. It most often is, or that form of greed we call vanity. . . . But beware of underestimating this motive. ... God help the ungreedy-that is, the Australian blacks, the poor Bushmen of South Africa, those angelic and virtuous Caribs, whom Columbus massacred in the earthly paradise of Haiti, and all other good primitives who, because they had no appetite, never grew Reprinted from Twelve Against the Gods by William Bolitho. Copyright, 1929, by Simon and Schuster, Inc. An Explanation TO ROSEMARY This book is written primarily for my own pleasure and not to shrink or stretch the stature of the late Henry Ford. It is doubtful if a single word ofmine could add a brick or scratch to the incomparable monument he built to mass production. He confused the critics in life there is no reason to suppose he will perplex the historians less, but the clay is now theirs. This is no bilious expose, no definitive biography, no honeyed hymn in his honor, but a series of reminiscences of mine, of men pres ently or past members of the Ford hierarchy and of others who knew him as a human being who was neither pristine saint nor as black as his traducers wanted to make out. When I became acquainted with him he was a full-blown per sonality and the spotlight had disposed its silver shawl caressingly about his shoulders. Consequently I am concerned here with him after he became a controversial figure. These chapters have little to say of his heritage, his boyhood, his early struggles. Of such days I have only the enfeebled recollections of a corporals guard of early playmates. I do not know if he was a good boy or bad boy, a trial to his folks, the despair of a father who preferred he stay on the farm. Anyway, there is no intention here of building into significance a period when, if he made a screwdriver of his mothers darning needle, or kissed the butchers daughter, or stuffed his blouse into a cap when he went swimming, or fixed a watch behind a geography, he only did what thousands of other boys did before him and have done since. No one but he and Mrs. Ford attended in the kitchen of the home oa the night when the first engine coughed for the first time. I was not a witness when they barged off to the probable mockery of those at the vi AN EXPLANATION curb and the derision of those driving horses they met on the way. Personally I know onlythat the scoffers on the sidewalk and those who clucked along the roads as the Fords passed and reached for their car riage whips to quiet their perpendicular mares, showed up later in many an ingle-nook drawing painful comfort from stories they told of how near they came to buying stock in Fords first motorized surrey and were deterred not by doubt not at all but by an unlucky lack of coppers at the time...