July Henry Ford, a3 an engineer is only important in that he more thoroughly mechanized his methods of production, thereby redueing costs. and sterilizing human individuality. But as a salesman, Ford became something far more important: he is: the father of a philosophy which is the secret of that type of economic enthusiasm which, in the United States, is called Prosperity. Henry Ford manufactured a motor car by machinery, which meant that he had spend a vast fortune turning out: one individual ear. The millions which went into the creation of, this machinery could obviously not be returned by the sale of that first car. He would have to sell millions of cars to make a profit.
This fact alone created an entirely new conception in business. The manufacturer who charges G.$10,000 for a single car has a very narrow market anywhere in the world; but Ford had to find, or rather had to create a broad market. The result was that he manufactured a car for the proletariat and the, petit bourgeois, as the Com munists like to put it, a car which sells at a price that feels like nothing at all, particularly when the car is purchased on the instalment plan. He wen! into the cities with his Model T, but more expecially did he cul:
vote the farmer and the small villager, who in time bought some ten millions of his cars and swore by him as the saviour of their particular kind of man. For, the Ford: in America made} the farm a suburb of the town the town adjacent to the No longer need the farmer regard himself as an isolated clot of clay, far from the things that men crave. All he need da, is to take out his Ford, step on it, as the phrase is, and rattle to civilization, In the days when movies were innovations and the radio was not yet, the Ford meant the difference between rusticity and recreation, between the dreary dullness of Peasant existence and the stim: ulating civilization of the city.
But to continue to sell his output, Ford had to create new customers. He had to stimulate motor car purchasing among the economically lower strata of society. His was a comparative. ly poor man's car and his task was to convince increasingly, large numbers of men who believed that they could not afford to buy motor cars that they should own Fords, It is in thig respect that Ford moves from mechanics to philosophy, for he conceived the really great doctrine that the producer must 30 redistribute his increment that even his own employees become his customers. Thus, Ford bor gan by paying a G.$5 minimum wage, which immediately jerked his labourers from proletarian to the lower middle class, He cut his working week from six toa five and a half days and eventually to a five day week, which meant that his workers would have plenty of leisure for travel and recreation in the vicinity of their works—and a Ford would be most useful in such circumstances. He kept cutting the working hours each day, Applied on a grabd scale, Fordized" wages, and days and hours of work, produced, in the United. States, a labouring class which is, on the whole, not. proletarian but bourgeois. Thai means, in non-communist lange uage, that the labourer regards himself asia middle-class person because he owns property, often a Ford, some shares in the industry in: which. he works, and possibly a house, which may be mortgaged to: the company for which he works, In effect, he is a small. capitalist with a vested interest. often in the business in which his only task is to see that a Robot turns screw in manner at the appropriate time, Ford has recently started a factory in England, in which ho will employ Bri exactly the same employs American labour in hig own country, He will pay high wages and reduce the working hours. And he will undoubtedly use British materials, as far ad possible, because his object is to make it possible for the British farmer and worker to own a Ford ear made in England a3 he has made it possible for similar classes in his own country to consume his now unpurchasable Model T. It is an interesting question in labour psy= chology to see what will happen. Will the British farmer and labourer invest in a motor car and tour the country on his week-end holidays? Will_he send his wife to the larger cities to buy her supplies more cheaply? It has been suggested that the revolution Mr, Ford worked was to change the United States from a country into a city. Will the crofter become urbanized in the British Isles as everyone seems to have become in the United States? The thousands of possible social changes that this one idea brings to mind, for good and evil, need not be considered here. Suffice it thi Henry Ford has come to Eny-land with his methods of into: sifed mechanization and his ideas of widespread salesmanship which respects no dist tion between necessity and luxury but makes of both one, Is this not, in effect, Socialism? And is it not an anomaly that stich applied. Socialism should be the business method of the world's largest capitalist?'
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.