Henry Ford: Symbol of an Age

RODERICK NASH

The election of Warren G. Harding as president reflected a massive popular reaction

against the missionary idealism of Woodrow Wilson and the reformist zeal of the Pro-

gressive era. Harding would take the country back to "normalcy," so that Americans

might continue their "normal, onward way." Essentially, this meant that federal regula-

tion of industry would be reduced to a minimum, that the business of government, as

Calvin Coolidge put it, would be big business.

The popular stereotype of the 1920s is that it was a decade of political corruption,

speculative orgies, violence, and the last happy fling before the Great Depression crushed

American innocence. But in reality this decade of "normalcy" ivas a good deal more

complex than that. True, business consolidation under Republican rule continued

throughout the decade. True, excessive and irresponsible speculation on the New York

Stock Exchange culminated in the crash of 1929. True, organized crime was wide-

spread, and gang wars rocked Chicago and New York. And true, a revolution in man-

ners and morals challenged traditional standards and profoundly upset Americans who

clung to the old morality.

Yet for many contemporaries, the 1920s were a time of exhilarating hope and high

expectation for the United States. In fact, a number of intellectuals found much in

American life to celebrate. Most optimistic of all were the businesspeople, who believed

they were living in a new era — a time not only of conservative Republican leadership in

Washington but of striking innovation and change in business itself. As industrial offi-

cials happily observed, corporate managers were bringing scientific procedures and efficient

techniques to industry. This change, they contended, would raise production so high that

176

poverty would soon be eliminated and the American dream of abundance for all would be

attained at last. Their expectations, alas, perished in the crash of 1929 and the ensuing

Depression, the worst the country had ever known.

During the 1920s, however, the United States seemed enormously prosperous, and

the American businessperson enjoyed new preeminence in American life. One business-

man became a leading figure of the decade. Indeed, his technological genius, love of

country, and old-fashioned Americanism made him a folk hero to a large segment of

American society. This was car maker Henry Ford, who introduced the first car built

for the common person — the Model T— and whose technique of assembly-line pro-

duction revolutionized American technology. What Ford wrought, as David Halber-

stam has said, also profoundly altered the way Americans lived: it made them far more

mobile than they had been in the railroad age, and it created a culture of leisure in

which people thought as much about recreation as they did about their jobs. As we shall

see in a subsequent selection, the automobile dramatically changed American customs of

courtship.

Ironically, Ford himself despised most of the social changes he helped bring about. A

champion of the Protestant work ethic, he abhorred the very idea of leisure. "Work," he

contended, "is the salvation of the race, morally, physically, socially. Work does more

than get us our living; it gets us our life." He could be remarkably contradictory and un-

predictable. He introduced the $5 wage for an eight-hour day (which revolutionized

labor policy in industrial America) and yet opposed the union movement. He owned a

fifty-six-room mansion and built the Ford Motor Company into what one author de-

scribed as the biggest "family-owned industrial empire in the world," accumulating a

total of $1 billion in profits, and yet he claimed to care little for material things and

pleasures. "I have never known," he said, "what to do with money after my expenses

were paid." In the end, he donated $40 million to philanthropic enterprises. He consid-

ered himself a pacifist, so much so that in 1915 he dispatched a "peace ship" to Europe

in a futile if honorable attempt to stop the First World War. Yet this same man had

what Roderick Nash calls a rural, "Bible-belt morality." He expatiated on the evils of

jazz (it was all "monkey talk" and "jungle squeals") and blamed it and the new

dances on a Jewish conspiracy. In fact, he published anti-Semitic diatribes in his Dear-

born, Michigan, newspaper (he did retract his anti-Semitic statements in 1927).

The key to Ford's contradictory mind, as Nash says in the next selection, was am-

bivalence. He was both "old and new." He looked backward and forward at the same

time, defending technology while extolling the old rural values and attitudes of a bygone

era. In this respect, he symbolized the America of his age — a changing, industrial

America that longed for the security of the old days as it struggled with the complexities

of the new.

177

1

THE TWENTIES

GLOSSARY

ALGER, HORATIO Gilded Age author whoseheroes rose from poverty to greatness and thusfulfilled the "American dream."

FORDISMUS German word for Ford's"revolutionary mass-production techniques."

MCGUFFEYREADER Its "moral-coatedlanguage lessons" in such stories as "The Hare andthe Tortoise" were the staple of Ford's academicdiet.

MODEL T Ford's first automobile, built for themasses.

Few names were better known to Americansfrom 1917 to 1930 than that of Henry Ford.Whether one read his publications,1 or fol-

lowed his headline-making public life, or merelydrove the car his company manufactured, Ford wasinescapable in the twenties. Indeed it is possible tothink of these years as the automobile age and HenryFord as its czar. The flivver, along with the flask andthe flapper, seemed to represent the 1920s in theminds of its people as well as its historians.

Cars symbolized change. They upset familiar pat-terns of living, working, recreating, even thinking.Much of the roar of the twenties came from the in-ternal combustion engine. While providing portablebedrooms in which to enjoy the decade's allegedsexual freedom, cars also assisted gangsters and boot-leggers in getting away. The image of two of themin every garage helped elect a President in 1928. Therise of widespread use of the automobile, in a word,contributed significantly to setting the twenties apart.And Henry Ford, calling machinery the "new Mes-siah" (as he did in 1929), seemed to herald thenew era.

Beneath the surface, however, such generaliza-tions ring hollow. Neither Ford nor the twentiesmerited the cliches with which each has been so fre-quently discussed. In the case of the man, both oldand new mingled in his mind. On the one handFord was a builder and bulwark of the modern,mechanized nation; on the other he devoted a re-markable amount" of effort and expense to sustaining

From pp. 154-163 of The Nervous Generation: American Thought,1917-1930 by Roderick Nash. Published by Rand-McNallyPublishing Company, Chicago. © 1970 by Roderick Nash.Reprinted by permission of Roderick Nash.

'In all probability Henry Ford did not actually write the numerousbooks, pamphlets, and articles associated with his name and attrib-uted to him in this chapter. He was not a literary man; his criticseven alleged he could not read! But Ford could pay people to ex-press his opinions for him, and there is no reason to think that theideas these writers recorded were not those of their employer.

old-faward-very- 'alist idid nfluitydicto

178

1

Henry Ford at the peak of his power, about 1914. As Nash ob-

served, Henry Ford was a "plain, honest, old-fashioned billion-

aire" and "technological genius" who fretted about the new moral-

ity of the Jazz Age, ridiculing jazz itself as "monkey talk" and

"jungle squeals" and blaming illicit liquor on a Jewish conspiracy.

Still, despite his rural outlook and biblical virtues, Ford was one

of the most popular Americans of the Roaring Twenties. (Collec-

tion of Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn,

Michigan)

old-fashioned America. In fact, the nostalgic, back-ward-looking Henry Ford repeatedly deplored the

very conditions that Ford the revolutionary industri-alist did so much to bring about. This ambivalence

did not signify a lack of values so much as a super-fluity. His faith was strong if bigoted and contra-

dictory. His prescriptions for America •were clear if

14 HENRY FORD: SYMBOL OF AN AGE

simple-minded. He seemed to the masses to demon-

strate that there could be change without disruption,and in so doing he eased the twenties' tensions.

"The average citizen," editorialized the New Republic

in 1923, "sees Ford as a sort of enlarged crayon por-

trait of himself; the man able to fulfill his own sup-

pressed desires, who has achieved enormous riches,

fame and power without departing from the pio-

neer-and-homespun tradition." In this nervous

clinging to old values even while undermining them

Ford was indeed a "crayon portrait" of his age.

But was Ford typical of the twenties? Can he

really be said to symbolize the age? He was, after all,

in his middle fifties when the decade began. How-

ever, a great many Americans were also middle-aged

in the 1920s, far more in fact than the twenty-year-

old collegians who have hitherto characterized these

years. And at one point even a group of college stu-

dents ranked Ford as the third greatest figure of all

time, behind Napoleon and Jesus Christ.

The Dearborn, Michigan, into which Henry Ford

was born in 1863 was a small farming community

only a generation removed from the frontier. Bothsides of the Ford family had agrarian backgrounds,

and the children grew up on the farm. Henry's for-

mal education began and ended in the Scotch Settle-

ment School which he attended for eight years. Thestaple of his academic diet was the McGuffey reader

with its rnoral-coated language lessons. When Ford

left school to become an apprentice mechanic in De-

troit, he also left the farm. But the farm never left

Henry. Agrarian ideas and values shaped his thought

even as he became an industrial king.

The 1880s for Ford were a time of aimlessness, his

only real interest being in tinkering with watches andother engines. In 1892 he joined the Edison Com-pany in Detroit as an engineer. During his spare time

he struggled with the problem of building a gasolineengine compact enough to power a moving vehicle.By 1896 Ford had his automobile. Soon he had it

doing ninety miles per hour! It required seven years

more, however, for him to secure the necessary finan-

179

THE TWENTIES

cial and-administrative backing to launch the FordMotor Company. The rest was pure Horatio Alger.

The first Model T appeared in 1908, and it soonmade good Ford's boast that he could build a car forthe masses. Six thousand sold the first year. Six yearslater, after the introduction of assembly line produc-tion, the figure was 248,000. From May to Decem-ber 1920 almost 700,000 Model Ts rolled out of theFord plants. The total for 1921 was one million. In1923, 57 percent of all cars manufactured in theUnited States were Fords. Three years later the FordMotor Company produced its thirteen millionth car.From the perspective of efficient production theFord organization was also something of a miracle.In 1913 it required twelve hours to make a car. Thefollowing year, after the introduction of the assemblyline techniques, the figure dropped to ninety-threeminutes. In 1920 Ford achieved his long-time dreamof building one car for every minute of the workingday. And still he was unsatisfied. On October 31,1925, the Ford Motor Company manufactured9,109 Model Ts, one every ten seconds. This wasthe high point, and competition was rising to chal-lenge Ford's preeminence, but by the end of thetwenties Henry Ford was a legend, a folk hero, andreputedly the richest man who ever lived. Tran-scending the role of automobile manufacturer, hehad become an international symbol of the new in-dustrialism. The Germans coined a word to describethe revolutionary mass production techniques:Fordismus. At home Ford's popularity reached thepoint where he could be seriously considered a pres-idential possibility for the election of 1924.

Fortunately for the historian of his thought, if notalways for himself, Henry Ford had a propensity forforthrightly stating his opinions on a wide variety ofsubjects outside his field of competence. He also hadthe money to publish and otherwise implement hisideas. The resulting intellectual portrait was that of amind steeped in traditional Americanism. For Fordagrarian simplicity, McGufFey morality, and Algeriandetermination were sacred objects. Nationalism was

!writ large over all Ford did, and America was great be-cause of its heritage of freedom, fairness, and hard,honest work. Ford's confidence in the beneficence ofold-fashioned virtues verged on the fanatical. The"spirit of'76," equal opportunity democracy, ruggedindividualism, the home, and motherhood wereFord's touchstones of reality. He deified pioneerethics and values. "More men are beaten than fail," hedeclared in 1928. "It is not wisdom they need, ormoney, or brilliance, or pull, but just plain gristle andbone." A decade earlier "Mr. Ford's Page" in theDearborn Independent stated that "one of the greatthings about the American people is that they are pio-neers." This idea led easily to American messianism."No one can contemplate the nation to which we be-long," the editorial continued, "without realizing thedistinctive prophetic character of its obvious missionto the world. We are pioneers. We are pathfinders.We are the roadbuilders. We are the guides, the van-guards of Humanity." Theodore Roosevelt andWoodrow Wilson had said as much, but Ford waswriting after the war that allegedly ended the nation'sinnocence and mocked its mission.

Ford's intense commitment to the traditionalAmerican faith led him to suspect and ultimately todetest •whatever was un-American. The same loyal-ties compelled him to search for explanations for theunpleasant aspects of the American 1920s that exon-erated the old-time, "native" citizen. The immi-grant, and particularly the Jew, were primary targetsof Ford's fire. In editorial after editorial in the Dear-born Independent and in several books Ford arguedthat aliens who had no knowledge of "the principleswhich have made our civilization" were responsiblefor its "marked deterioration" in the 1920s. Theywere, moreover,. determined to take over the coun-try if not the world. Spurred by such fears, Ford be-came a subscriber to the tired legend of an interna-tional Jewish conspiracy. When he couldn't findsufficient evidence for such a plot, Ford dispatched anumber of special detectives to probe the affairs ofprominent Jews and collect documentation. The

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search resulted in the "discovery" of the so-called"Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," an al-leged exposition of the scheme by which the Jewsplanned to overthrow Gentile domination. Althoughthe "Protocols" was exposed as a forgery in 1921,Ford continued to use the spurious document tosubstantiate his anti-Semitism until late in the

. decade. Everything wrong with modern Americancivilization, from the corruption of music to the cor-ruption of baseball, was attributed to Jewish influ-ence. Unable to admit that America as a wholemight be blamed for its problems, unwilling to ques-tion the beneficence of time-honored ways, Fordsearched for a scapegoat. He found it in the new-comers who, he believed, had no conception of orappreciation for American ideals.

The tension in Henry Ford's thought between oldand new, between a belief in progress and a ten-dency to nostalgia, is dramatically illustrated in his at-titude toward farming and farmers. On the one handhe believed farm life to be a ceaseless round of ineffi-cient drudgery. Indeed, he had abundant personalevidence, remarking at one point, "I have traveledten thousand miles behind a plow. I hated the gruel-ing grind of farm work." With the incentive of spar-ing others-this painful experience, Ford addressedhimself to the problem of industrializing agriculture.The farmer, in Ford's opinion, should become atechnician and a businessman. Tractors (Ford's, ofcourse) should replace horses. Mechanization wouldmake it possible to produce in twenty-five workingdays what formerly required an entire year. Fenceswould come down and vast economies of scale takeplace. Ford's modern farmer would not even need tolive on his farm but instead could commute from acity home. To give substance to these ideals Fordbought and operated with astonishing success a nine-thousand-acre farm near Dearborn.

Still Ford, the "Father of Modern Agriculture," ashe has been dubbed, was only part of the man. Healso retained a strong streak of old-fashioned, horse-and-buggy agrarianism. Farming, from this stand-

14 HENRY FORD: SYMBOL OF AN AGE

point, was more than a challenge in production; itwas a moral act. Constantly in the twenties, evenwhile he was helping make it possible, Ford brandedthe modern city a "pestiferous growth." He de-lighted in contrasting the "unnatural," "twisted,"and "cooped up" lives of city-dwellers with the"wholesome" life of "independence" and "sterlinghonesty" that the farm environment offered. InFord's view the importance of cities in the nation'sdevelopment had been greatly exaggerated. Early inthe 1920s the Dearborn Independent editorialized:"when we all stand up and sing, 'My Country 'Tis ofThee,' we seldom think of the cities. Indeed, in thatold national hymn there are no references to the cityat all. It sings of rocks and rivers and hills — the greatAmerican Out-of-Doors. And that is really TheCountry. That is, the country is THE Country. Thereal United States lies outside the cities."

As such a manifesto suggests, a bias toward natureand rural conditions was an important element inHenry Ford's thought. "What children and adultsneed," he told one reporter, "is a chance to breatheGod's fresh air and to stretch their legs and have alittle garden in the soil." This ideal led Ford tochoose small towns instead of cities as the sites of hisfactories. "Turning back to village industry," as Fordput it in 1926, would enable people to reestablish asense of community — with nature and with men —that urbanization had destroyed. Ford believed thatcities were doomed as Americans discovered the ad-vantages of country life.

Ford's enthusiasm for nature did not stop with ru-ralism. From 1914 to 1924 he sought a more com-plete escape from civilization on a series of campingtrips with Thomas A. Edison. John Burroughs, thenaturalist, and Harvey Firestone, the tire king, alsoparticipated. Although the equipment these self-styled vagabonds took into the woods was far fromprimitive, they apparently shared a genuine love ofthe outdoors. In the words of Burroughs, they"cheerfully endured wet, cold, smoke, mosquitoes,black flies, and sleepless nights, just to touch naked

181

THE TWENTIES

reality once more." Ford had a special fondness forbirds. With typical exuberance he had five hundredbirdhouses built on his Michigan farm, includingone with seventy-six apartments which he called,appropriately, a "bird hotel." There were also elec-tric heaters and electric brooders for Ford's fortunatebirds. The whole production mixed technology andnature in a way that symbolized Ford's ambivalence.When he could not camp or visit his aviary, Fordliked to read about the natural world. Indeed he pre-ferred the works of Emerson, Thoreau, and Bur-roughs to the Bible. Ford so admired Burroughs' va-riety of natural history that even before becomingacquainted with him he sent him a new Ford car.

As for roads and automobiles, Ford saw them notas a threat to natural conditions but rather as a wayfor the average American to come into contact withnature. The machine and the garden were not in-compatible. "I will build a motor car for the greatmultitude . . . ," Ford boasted, "so low in price thatno man . .. will be unable to own one — and enjoywith his family the blessings of hours of pleasure inGod's great open spaces." In My Life and Work of1923 Ford again confronted the tension between na-ture and modern civilization. He-declared that hedid not agree .with..those who saw mechanizationleading to a "cold, metallic sort of world in whichgreat factories will drive away the trees, the flowers,the birds and the green fields." According to Ford,"unless we know more about machines and their use. . . we cannot have the time to enjoy the trees andthe birds, and the flowers, and the green fields."Such reconciliations, only partially covered Ford'snervousness about the mechanized, urbanized future.Contradictions persisted in his thinking. The sameman who envisaged fenceless bonanza farms couldsay, "I love to walk across country and jump fences."The lover of trees could state in utmost seriousness,"better wood can be made than is grown."

Ford's attitude toward history has been subject towide misunderstanding. The principal source of con-fusion is a statement Ford made in 1919 at the trial

resulting from his libel suit against the Chicago Tri-bune. "History," he declared, "is more or less thebunk. It is tradition. We don't want tradition. Wewant to live in the present, and the only history thatis worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today."On another occasion he admitted that he "wouldn'tgive a nickel for all the history in the world." Com-plementing this sentiment is Ford's reputation as aforward-looking inventor and revolutionary indus-trialist unsatisfied with the old processes. Here seemsa man fully at home in the alleged new era of the1920s. But in fact Ford idolized the past. His "his-tory . . . is bunk" remark came in response to a ques-tion about ancient history and Napoleon Bonaparteand had reference to written history. For history it-self— what actually happened in his nation's pastand its tangible evidence — Ford had only praise.

The most obvious evidence of Ford's enthusiasmfor history was his collector's instinct. He began withthe bastion of his own youth, the McGuffey readers.Sending agents out to scour the countryside andputting aside considerations of cost, Ford owned by1925 one of the few complete collections of themany McGufFey editions. Hoping to share his treas-ures with his contemporaries, Ford had five thousandcopies of Old Favorites from the McGuffey Readersprinted in 1926, The book contained such classicstories as "Try, Try Again" and "The Hare and theTortoise." It dispensed an ideal of individualism and,self-reliance at the same time that Ford's assemblylines were making'men cogs in an impersonal ma-chine.

From books Ford turned to things, and during the1920s amassed a remarkable collection of Americanantiques. He bought so widely and so aggressivelythat he became a major factor in prices in the an-tique market. Everything was fair game. Lamps anddolls, bells and grandfather clocks made their way toDearborn. Size was no problem. Ford gatheredenough machines to show the evolution of thethreshing operation from 1849 to the 1920s. An-other exhibit traced the development of wagons in

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14 HENRY FORD: SYMBOL OF AN AGE

America. Eventually the entire heterogeneous col-lection went into the Edison Museum at Dearborn, apretentious building designed to resemble, simulta-neously, Independence Hall, Congress Hall, and theold City Hall of Philadelphia. Ford delighted inshowing visitors around the five-acre layout. Askedon one occasion why he collected, Ford replied, "sothat they will not be lost to America." Later, on thesame tour, Ford played a few bars on an antiqueorgan and observed, "that takes me back to my boy-hood days. They were beautiful days."

This sentiment undoubtedly figured in Ford's1920 decision to restore his boyhood home. Every-thing had to be exactly as he remembered it. Furni-ture, china, and rugs were rehabilitated or recon-structed. Ford even used archaeological techniquesto recover artifacts around the family homestead.The ground was dug to a depth of six feet and thesilverware, wheels, and other equipment used by hisparents in the 1860s were recovered. In 1922 Fordpurchased the Wayside Inn at Sudbury, Massachu-setts, to preserve it from destruction. Celebrated bythe poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the old innappealed to Ford as a symbol of pioneer days. Heopened it for the public's edification in 1924. But anew highway ran too near. Roaring cars disturbedthe horse-and-buggy atmosphere. So, turning againstthe age he helped create, Ford had the state highwayrerouted around the shrine at a cost of $250,000. Healso bought and restored the schoolhouse in Sudburyalleged to be the site where Mary and her little lambgamboled. Naturally the shop of the "Village Black-smith," also in Sudbury, had to be included in Ford's

antique empire.Beginning in 1926 with the construction of

Greenfield Village near Dearborn, Ford embarkedon a career of large-scale historical restoration. Thistime not a building but a whole community was theobject of his attention. Greenfield, named after theMichigan hamlet in which Ford's mother grew up,was a monument to his agrarianism as well as hisreverence for the past. "I am trying in a small way,"

Ford explained with unwarranted modesty, "to helpAmerica take a step . . . toward the saner and sweeteridea of life that prevailed in pre-war days." Green-field Village had gravel roads, gas street lamps, agrassy common, and an old-fashioned country store.The automobile mogul permitted only horse-drawnvehicles on the premises. The genius of assembly linemass production engaged a glass blower, blacksmith,and cobbler to practice their obsolete crafts in thetraditional manner. Ford dispatched his agents toseek out, purchase, and transport to Greenfield thecottages of Walt Whitman, Noah Webster, andPatrick Henry. In time they even secured thecrowning glory: the log cabin in which WilliamHolmes McGuffey had been born and raised.

History, then, was not "bunk" to Henry Ford.The speed of change seemed to increase proportion-ately to his desire to retain contact with the past. AsFord declared in 1928, a year before completingGreenfield Village, "improvements have been com-ing so quickly that the past is being lost to the risinggeneration." To counter this tendency Ford laboredto put history into a form "where it may be seen andfelt." But values and attitudes were also on display.Ford looked back with nostalgia to the pioneerethic. With it, he-believed, the nation had beensound, wholesome, happy, and secure. "The OldWays," as the Dearborn Independent declared, "WereGood."

Ford's opinion of the new morality of the jazz agewas, not surprisingly, low. He deplored the use oftobacco and even went so far as to publish for masscirculation a tract, entitled The Case Against the LittleWhite Slaver, which excoriated cigarettes. WhenFord had the power he went beyond exhortation."No one smokes in the Ford industries," their leaderproclaimed in 1929. As for alcohol, Ford was equallyunyielding. Twice he threatened to make his inter-national labor force teetotalers at the risk of theirjobs. In his American plants Ford enforced a policyof abstinence. Any workman detected drinking pub-licly or even keeping liquor at home was subject to

183

THE TWENTIES

dismissal. The prohibition policy of the 1920s, inFord's estimation, was a great triumph. "There are amillion boys growing up in the United States," heexulted in 1929, "who have never seen a saloon andwho will never know the handicap of liquor."When confronted with evidence of widespread vio-lation of the Eighteenth Amendment, Ford had aready explanation. A Jewish conspiracy was to blamefor illicit booze. The mass of real Americans, Fordbelieved, were, like himself, dry by moral convictionas well as by law.

Sex was too delicate a matter to be addressed di-rectly, but Ford conveyed his opinions through adiscussion of music and dancing. Few aspects of theAmerican 1920s worried him more than the evils ofjazz. The new music clashed squarely with his rural-ism and Bible-belt morality. In 1921 Ford struck outin anger at "the waves upon waves of musical slushthat invaded decent parlors and set the young peopleof this generation imitating the drivel of morons."Organized Jewry, once again, was blamed for themusical degeneracy. "The mush, the slush, the slysuggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of slidingnotes," declared the Dearborn Independent, "are ofJewish origin." The problem, obviously, was notonly musical but sexual as well. The loosening ofmorals in the 1920s appalled Ford. He expressed hisfeelings in reference to jazz: "monkey talk, junglesqueals, grunts and squeaks and gasps suggestive ofcave love are camouflaged by a few feverish notes."What Ford could only bring himself to call "thething" appeared also in song tides such as In Room202 and Sugar Baby. Pointing to the Jewish origin ofthese tunes (Irving Berlin was a frequent target of at-tacks), Ford called on his countrymen to crush theserpent in their midst.

The reform of dancing fitted nicely into Ford'scampaign to elevate the nation's morals to old-timestandards. His interest began with the collection oftraditional folk dances. Not only the scores but thebackwoods fiddlers themselves were invited to Dear-born to play Old Zip Coon and Arkansas Traveler. To

Ford's delight, here was something both wholesomeand historical. He also manifested concern over socialdancing, publishing in 1926 a guidebook entitled"Good Morning": After a Sleep of Twenty-Jive Years Old-Fashioned Dancing is Being Revived by Mr. and Mrs.

Henry Ford. The book also endeavored to revive old-fashioned morality. It began by condemning aspromiscuous the newer dances such as the Charlestonand the whole flapper syndrome. "A gentleman," thebook explained, "should be able to guide his partnerthrough a dance without embracing her as if he wereher lover." Proper deportment, according to Ford,minimized physical contact. "[The gentleman's] righthand should be placed at his partner's waist, thumband forefinger alone touching her — that is, the handbeing in the position of holding a pencil." There werealso rules regarding gloves, handkerchiefs, and theway to request a partner for a dance. Ford's dancemanual, in short, was a monument to the old concep-tions of morality, decorum, and order, and the danceshe and his wife hosted at Dearborn were implementa-tions. Precisely at nine Ford's guests convened inevening dress in a lavish ballroom for a paean to Vic-torianism.

Ambivalence is the key to the mind of HenryFord. He was both old and new; he looked both for-ward and backward. Confidently progressive as hewas in some respects, he remained nervous about thenew ways. The more conditions changed, the morethe nostalgic Ford groped for the security of tradi-tional values and institutions. He was not lost; on thecontrary, he had too many gods, at least for consis-tency. Neither was he dissipated and roaring. And hehated jazz. But Ford was popular, indeed a nationaldeity, in the twenties.even if his senatorial and presi-dential bids fell short. As a plain, honest, old-fash-ioned billionaire, a technological genius who lovedto camp out, he seemed to his contemporaries to re-solve the moral dilemmas of the age. Like Charles A.Lindbergh, another god of the age, Ford testified tothe nation's ability to move into the future withoutlosing the values of the past.

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