Nimrod
May 19th 2004, 02:05 PM
During a May 1916 the Chicago Tribune interview, a reporter challenged Michigan mega-industrialist Henry Ford to explain something: with all this trouble swirling around the globe, why did he oppose building up America's armed forces? He pointed out to Ford that more than 100 years earlier, it was the British fleet that had prevented Napoleon's mighty French army from crossing the 21-mile-wide English Channel to conquer Britain. Ford rejected this argument, declaring "I don't know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across there (to England) and I don't care. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today."
Henry Ford — wealthy, powerful, the man famous for almost single-handedly creating the American auto industry — would live to regret having said that. And his home state and the rest of America would be the better for it. For years he would struggle, trying to explain what he meant by the "bunk" remark, and in the end create the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, the nation's first large indoor and outdoor complex dedicated to preserving history. The Tribune published the interview in its May 25 issue. Normally it would have been read and forgotten. After all, Ford had said nothing about history that in essence had not been said before. Even Napoleon himself, that great maker of history, defined it as "a fable agreed upon," and Thomas Carlyle, the great writer of history, dismissed it as "a distillation of rumor." But Ford's published comment about history being bunk would become the most quoted — and most misunderstood — statement he ever uttered.
A month later the Tribune reported Ford refused to guarantee the jobs of his auto company employees who, as National Guard members, had been mobilized to defend against incursions along the Mexican border. It also ran an editorial entitled "Ford is an Anarchist," denouncing him as an "ignorant idealist" and an "anarchistic enemy of his country." The accusation that Ford would not rehire workers performing military service was totally false, the charge of anarchism utterly absurd. Ford at once demanded a retraction from Robert McCormick, the super-patriotic publisher of the Tribune. McCormick refused, whereupon Ford filed a $1 million libel suit.
After much legal maneuvering, long after the crises in Mexico and Europe had passed, the case came to trial in Mt. Clemens, Michigan, in May 1919. Seizing on Ford's "history is bunk" assertion, one of McCormick's lawyers bombarded the auto maker with questions designed to demonstrate he was indeed an "ignorant idealist." The tactic succeeded all too well. Ford, who as a boy obtained only a skimpy education in a rural school, knew nothing about the Civil War campaigns of Generals Grant and Sherman, confused the War of 1812 with the American Revolution, and when asked to identify famous traitor Benedict Arnold replied: "He is a writer, I think." Laughter erupted in the courtroom, laughter echoed in print by the nation's newspapers and magazines.
There was more laughter when, on August 14, the jury announced its verdict: McCormick's Tribune was guilty of libel, but Ford, one of the wealthiest men in the world, was awarded a derisory six cents in damages. Most men would have felt humiliated. Not Ford. Throughout his career he responded to setbacks by renewing his efforts to move ahead. It was the same now. Riding back to Detroit after the trial he told his private secretary, Ernest Liebold, "I am going to start up a museum and give people a true picture of the development of the country. That is the only history that is worth observing, that you can preserve in itself. We're going to build a museum that is going to show industrial history, and it won't be bunk."
http://away.com/primedia/transport/henry_ford_1.html
Henry Ford — wealthy, powerful, the man famous for almost single-handedly creating the American auto industry — would live to regret having said that. And his home state and the rest of America would be the better for it. For years he would struggle, trying to explain what he meant by the "bunk" remark, and in the end create the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, the nation's first large indoor and outdoor complex dedicated to preserving history. The Tribune published the interview in its May 25 issue. Normally it would have been read and forgotten. After all, Ford had said nothing about history that in essence had not been said before. Even Napoleon himself, that great maker of history, defined it as "a fable agreed upon," and Thomas Carlyle, the great writer of history, dismissed it as "a distillation of rumor." But Ford's published comment about history being bunk would become the most quoted — and most misunderstood — statement he ever uttered.
A month later the Tribune reported Ford refused to guarantee the jobs of his auto company employees who, as National Guard members, had been mobilized to defend against incursions along the Mexican border. It also ran an editorial entitled "Ford is an Anarchist," denouncing him as an "ignorant idealist" and an "anarchistic enemy of his country." The accusation that Ford would not rehire workers performing military service was totally false, the charge of anarchism utterly absurd. Ford at once demanded a retraction from Robert McCormick, the super-patriotic publisher of the Tribune. McCormick refused, whereupon Ford filed a $1 million libel suit.
After much legal maneuvering, long after the crises in Mexico and Europe had passed, the case came to trial in Mt. Clemens, Michigan, in May 1919. Seizing on Ford's "history is bunk" assertion, one of McCormick's lawyers bombarded the auto maker with questions designed to demonstrate he was indeed an "ignorant idealist." The tactic succeeded all too well. Ford, who as a boy obtained only a skimpy education in a rural school, knew nothing about the Civil War campaigns of Generals Grant and Sherman, confused the War of 1812 with the American Revolution, and when asked to identify famous traitor Benedict Arnold replied: "He is a writer, I think." Laughter erupted in the courtroom, laughter echoed in print by the nation's newspapers and magazines.
There was more laughter when, on August 14, the jury announced its verdict: McCormick's Tribune was guilty of libel, but Ford, one of the wealthiest men in the world, was awarded a derisory six cents in damages. Most men would have felt humiliated. Not Ford. Throughout his career he responded to setbacks by renewing his efforts to move ahead. It was the same now. Riding back to Detroit after the trial he told his private secretary, Ernest Liebold, "I am going to start up a museum and give people a true picture of the development of the country. That is the only history that is worth observing, that you can preserve in itself. We're going to build a museum that is going to show industrial history, and it won't be bunk."
http://away.com/primedia/transport/henry_ford_1.html