Fordlandia (8 page)

THE OUTBREAK OF war in Europe in August 1914 shattered the illusion that the battle flags of the world would soon be furled. Rather than dousing the dream, however, the European conflict provoked ever more desperate efforts to realize it, like Henry Ford’s “peace ship.”

Ford had seized on the notion of chartering an ocean liner to float a “people’s delegation” to Europe to negotiate an end to the conflict in November 1915, after an associate raised the idea in passing, and he threw himself into the endeavor with the same impetuous energy he brought to his other, more mechanical passions. “I will do everything in my power to prevent murderous, wasteful war in America and in the whole world,” he said, committing to stay in Europe as long as it took to bring peace to the continent. “I will devote my life to fight this spirit of militarism.” Working closely with members of the world peace movement, Ford arranged to rent the Scandinavian-American Line’s
Oscar II
and set up a command center in New York’s Biltmore Hotel, sending out a barrage of invitations to the best names in American politics, society, and industry to join his “international peace pilgrimage.” “We’re going to try to get the boys out of the trenches before Christmas,” was the slogan Ford adopted for the campaign, having come to appreciate the publicity value of a succinct, well-turned phrase.
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Ford’s flair for bombast was more than matched by the theatricality of the fifteen thousand people who crammed a Hoboken pier to send off his “peace ark.” A band played “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” as the crew of the
Oscar
tried to sort out who was legitimately part of the Ford entourage and who was trying to stow away. Most of the country’s prominent liberal internationalists, intellectuals, and religious leaders, like William Jennings Bryan, William Howard Taft, and Louis Brandeis respectfully declined the industrialist’s invitation to join his odyssey. “My heart is with you,” apologized Helen Keller for not being able to make the trip. Jane Addams did accept but fell ill and couldn’t sail. That left Ford with an odd and volatile assortment of lesser-known dissenters, vegetarians, socialists, pacifists, and suffragists as companions. That the voyagers seemed more at home under a carnival tent than in the halls of diplomacy was underscored by the arrival of a gift of two caged squirrels—“to go with the nuts,” some wag said. Ford himself, swaddled in a full-length overcoat, stood on the ship’s deck in the winter wind with beatific pink cheeks and a frozen smile, bowing over and over again to well-wishers. One reporter asked him what his supporters should do while he was away. “Tell the people to cry peace,” he said, and “fight preparedness.” Among those gathered on the dock was Mr. Zero, the street-performance name of antihunger activist Urbain Ledoux, who would later be known for staging “slave auctions” of unemployed workers in the Boston Common. When he tried to do the same in New York’s Bryant Park, cops rioted and beat the assembled crowd with billy clubs, provoking a nightlong melee in which thousands of the jobless marched through Broadway’s theater district chanting “Hurrah for the army of the unemployed!” and demanding to know “When do we eat?” As the
Oscar
pulled away from the dock and the band struck up “I Didn’t Raise My Son to Be a Soldier,” Mr. Zero leapt into the cold Hudson waters. Fished out of the bay, he told reporters that he was “swimming to reach public opinion.”
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The mission proved a bust. In the middle of the voyage, President Woodrow Wilson announced that he would call on Congress to increase the size of the standing army, a policy shift that split the delegates into competing factions, between those who felt they needed to call off the mission in deference to Wilson and those who insisted on pressing forward. Ford joined the militants but, laid low by a flu and realizing that he was in over his head, sequestered himself in his cabin until the
Oscar
arrived in –12° Oslo on December 18. He returned to the United States nearly immediately, leaving his fellow delegates to make their futile “people’s intervention” on their own. “Guess I had better go home to mother,” he told them, meaning his wife, Clara. “You’ve got this thing started now and can get along without me.”

The voyage of the
Oscar
revealed the unwillingness of many of America’s most influential intellectuals and politicians, despite their nominal commitment to peace, to challenge a president whom they saw as a fellow internationalist, first when Woodrow Wilson promised to use his office to press for arbitration in Europe and then when he began his military buildup. But it also exposed Ford’s vision of Americanism to a powerful backlash, led by Theodore Roosevelt.

WHEN THEODORE ROOSEVELT returned from the Amazon in May 1914, he was thinned by parasites and fever. During the trip, an infection had eaten at his flesh and despair had brought him to the edge of suicide. He had lost three men to murder and the river and had almost lost his son Kermit. Yet Roosevelt, who served as president from 1901 to 1909, recovered enough to lecture on his adventures, and once he convinced skeptics that he had discovered a new river—now flowing under the name “Roosevelt”—he began again to concern himself with social issues, including the new Five Dollar Day plan Ford had put in place while he was away. He wrote to Ford to suggest they have lunch or dinner the next time Ford was in New York. Roosevelt wanted to know a “great many things” about his factory system—not just how Ford was handling his “workmen from the purely industrial and social side” but also his “method of dealing with the immigrant workingmen.”
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Both men contributed, in their own way, to the triumph of the “Progressive Era” over the abuses of the barons and trusts that emerged from America’s first period of industrial expansion. They shared a number of friends, including Thomas Edison and the naturalist John Burroughs, and Roosevelt, the first president to ride in a car, felt “not merely friendliness” toward Ford “but in many respects a very genuine admiration.” But the meeting did not take place, for as Ford became the voice of a frustrated pacifism, Roosevelt’s admiration soured into scorn and “cutting sarcasm.” “Mr. Ford’s visit abroad,” he said of the peace ship, “will not be mischievous only because it is ridiculous.”
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Roosevelt and Ford represented distinct traditions of Americanism, especially with respect to expansion beyond America’s borders. Where Ford believed the country should move forward to the steady hum of a well-organized factory, Roosevelt thought that the nation should march outward to the beat of a military bass drum. The Rough Rider urged men to live at the extremes, and he hailed the hard, besieged life of the frontier—whether in the Dakota badlands or in a tropical jungle—as essential in both building character and defining morality. “The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages,” he wrote in
The Winning of the West
, even though he admitted that such a war was “apt to be also the most terrible and inhumane.” His distaste for the flaccid commercialism of American society is well known. In 1899 he warned citizens against being lulled into a “swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace” and seduced by the “over-civilized man,” by which he and other militarists meant feminized, excessively cerebral intellectuals who believed that man’s baser instincts had been forever subdued by the triumph of bourgeois politics and economics. To counter these threats, Roosevelt prescribed war as a regenerative remedy. “He gushes over war,” wrote the psychologist William James, one of Roosevelt’s Harvard teachers, “as the ideal condition of human society, for the manly strenuousness which it involves.” The burdens of the presidency contained Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for battle and empire as an expression of national glory, and he even lent his support for an international arbitration court to be established in The Hague. Yet he nonetheless presided over an extraordinary expansion of the government and the armed forces in the realm of foreign policy.
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Ford, born on a farm, resentful to the point of paranoia of America’s eastern elite, and scornful of their bourgeois conceits, could hardly be considered “overcivilized.” Yet that’s exactly why his “pussyfooting” pacifism, as Roosevelt put it, represented such a threat to the ex-president’s martial nationalism. Neither an old-line isolationist nor an intellectual pacifist, Ford promoted an expansive heartland Americanism that sought to break the equation, often made by radicals, between industrial capitalism and militarism. He insisted that you could have the former without the latter. Although he was ridiculed in the press after his return from Norway in January, Ford’s pacifism continued to resonate with many Americans, not just dissenters but mainstream Christians and, before Ford went public with his anti-Semitism, Jews. “Henry Ford and his party are but swelling the ranks of ‘fools’ and ‘madmen,’ ” said Philadelphia rabbi Joseph Krauskopf in his Sabbath sermon to mark the sailing of the
Oscar
, “but they are in good company. . . . Would to God, we had more of their sort of foolishness.” Ford even beat both Roosevelt and Wilson in a St. Louis straw vote for president.
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Ford didn’t win that nomination, but he didn’t run. His candidacy was entered without his approval and he didn’t make speeches, engage in debate, or attend the nominating convention held in Chicago in June. Still, in the months leading to the convention, he received an outpouring of encouragement from farmers and industrial workers urging him to “fight the munition manufacturers.” “I am just a humble farmer,” one letter said, “but my three greatest desires are to vote for Ford, own a Ford, and see Ford elected president by the greatest majority given any man.” Residents of Parker, South Dakota, distributed handbills proclaiming that “no names are greater in the whole universe than George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Henry Ford.”
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This last encomium must have irked Roosevelt, for he often invoked Lincoln to scold pacifists. He sent Ford a letter in February 1916, telling him that by putting “peace above righteousness” he had made pacifism the “enemy of morality.” “Righteousness if triumphant brings peace,” he wrote, “but peace does not necessarily bring righteousness.”
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THREE MONTHS LATER, Roosevelt took his cause to the home of Fordism. He arrived in Detroit early on a May morning to the cheers of over a thousand well-wishers. The Michigan Republicans who organized the visit urged him to ignore Ford. But Roosevelt couldn’t contain himself, saying that he had come “girded to fight the pacifism of Ford.” Nearly all of his comments were aimed, either directly or indirectly, at the industrialist. At the city’s Opera House, an overflow crowd fought with police and firemen for an opportunity to hear the Bull Moose, who received a standing ovation when he called Ford an enemy of the “welfare of the country and its people.” “I’ve got two sons to go,” yelled a woman from the balcony in response to Roosevelt’s call for universal military service. “Madam,” he responded, “if every mother in the country would make the same offer, there would be no need for any mother to send her sons to war”—a reference not lost on the crowd since Ford’s son, Edsel, had not enlisted.
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Roosevelt enjoyed a reputation as a progressive, a buster of trusts and promoter of government regulation over industry. But by the time he reached Detroit he had largely abandoned his earlier advocacy of “social justice.” He had learned a lesson taught to many a would-be reformer: the drive to achieve a more equitable domestic society is too divisive a crusade—it is much easier to focus outward, on external threats, to achieve unity than to fight for fairness at home. Roosevelt’s preparedness campaign therefore meant more than national defense. It meant national identity.

Thus Roosevelt, even as he urged vigilance against Germany, could admit that he admired his Prussian adversaries for their discipline. “The highest civilization can only exist in the nation that controls itself,” he told his Opera House audience. “Above all, we must insist upon absolute Americanism.” Roosevelt’s vision of praetorian nationalism was directed squarely at Ford and his kitsch civic pageantry, and the praise he had earlier heaped on Ford’s Sociological Department for breaking down “hyphenated Americanism” had given way to contempt. In his call for universal conscription that May day, Roosevelt railed against the notion that “Americanism” could be forged on the factory floor, in the industrial city, or in the theatrics of papier-mâché melting pots and derby hats. What Roosevelt called the “great factories of Americanism” were to be found not in Highland Park but in the collective effort of war, or at least in the collective effort needed to prepare for war. “I believe the dog-tent would be a most effective way for democratizing and nationalizing our life,” he said, “quite as much so as the public school and far more so than the American factory.”
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Ford responded by casting Roosevelt as an anachronism from the past martial century, a wandering old soldier looking for one last battle to fight. “Ordinarily one considers an ex-president a little different from the everyday citizen,” remarked Ford. “It has been seven years since he was President, and in that time he has entirely failed to understand the trend of events and the sentiments of the people. I consider Roosevelt so antiquated that the ‘ex’ business does not mean anything. I consider him just an ordinary citizen because he does not keep up with the times.”
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He then left Detroit to go fishing, abruptly ending speculation as to whether the two Americanists would meet.

The United States entered World War I in April 1917, but that didn’t stop the feud. In 1918, Ford announced he was making a bid for Michigan’s seat in the US Senate in order to support Wilson’s proposed League of Nations. He lost that election too, though he did come within a few thousand votes of winning, again without having campaigned or spent any money electioneering.
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