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...
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