And we should not so easily be led into war if we considered what it is that makes a nation really great. It is not the amount of trade that makes a nation great. The creation of private fortunes, like the creation of an autocracy, does not make any country great. Nor does the mere change of an agricultural population into a factory population. A country becomes great when, by the wise development of its resources and the skill of its people, property is widely and fairly distributed.
Foreign trade is full of delusions. We ought to wish for every nation as large a degree of self-support as possible. Instead of wishing to keep them dependent on us for what we manufacture, we should wish them to learn to manufacture themselves and build up a solidly founded civilization. When every nation learns to produce the things which it can produce, we shall be able to get down to a basis of serving each other along those special lines in which there can be no competition.
The North Temperate Zone will never be able to compete with the tropics in the special products of the tropics. Our country will never be a competitor with the Orient in the production of tea, nor with the South in the production of rubber.
A large proportion of our foreign trade is based on the backwardness of our foreign customers. Selfishness is a motive that would preserve that backwardness. Humanity is a motive that would help the backward nations to a self-supporting basis. Take Mexico, for example. We have heard a great deal about the "development" of Mexico. Exploitation is the word that ought instead to be used. When its rich natural resources are exploited for the increase of the private fortunes of foreign capitalists, that is not development, it is ravishment. You can never develop Mexico until you develop the Mexican. And yet how much of the "development" of Mexico by foreign exploiters ever took account of the development of its people? The Mexican peon has been regarded as mere fuel for the foreign money-makers. Foreign trade has been his degradation.
Short-sighted people are afraid of such counsel. They say: "What would become of our foreign trade?"
When the natives of Africa begin raising their own cotton and the natives of Russia begin making their own farming implements and the natives of China begin supplying their own wants, it will make a difference, to be sure, but does any thoughtful man imagine that the world can long continue on the present basis of a few nations supplying the needs of the world? We must think in terms of what the world will be when civilization becomes general, when all the peoples have learned to help themselves.
When a country goes mad about foreign trade it usually depends on other countries for its raw material, turns its population into factory fodder, creates a private rich class, and lets its own immediate interest lie neglected. Here in the United States we have enough work to do developing our own country to relieve us of the necessity of looking for foreign trade for a long time. We have agriculture enough to feed us while we are doing it, and money enough to carry the job through. Is there anything more stupid than the United States standing idle because Japan or France or any other country has not sent us an order when there is a hundred-year job awaiting us in developing our own country?
Commerce began in service. Men carried off their surplus to people who had none. The country that raised corn carried it to the country that could raise no corn. The lumber country brought wood to the treeless plain. The vine country brought fruit to cold northern climes. The pasture country brought meat to the grassless region. It was all service. When all the peoples of the world become developed in the art of self-support, commerce will get back to that basis. Business will once more become service. There will be no competition, because the basis of competition will have vanished. The varied peoples will develop skills which will be in the nature of monopolies and not competitive.
From the beginning, the races have exhibited distinct strains of genius: this one for government; another for colonization; another for the sea; another for art and music; another for agriculture; another for business, and so on. Lincoln said that this nation could not survive half-slave and half-free. The human race cannot forever exist half-exploiter and half-exploited. Until we become buyers and sellers alike, producers and consumers alike, keeping the balance not for profit but for service, we are going to have topsy-turvy conditions.
France has something to give the world of which no competition can cheat her. So has Italy. So has Russia. So have the countries of South America. So has Japan. So has Britain. So has the United States. The sooner we get back to a basis of natural specialties and drop this free-for-all system of grab, the sooner we shall be sure of international self-respect--and international peace. Trying to take the trade of the world can promote war. It cannot promote prosperity. Some day even the international bankers will learn this.
I have never been able to discover any honourable reasons for the beginning of the World War. It seems to have grown out of a very complicated situation created largely by those who thought they could profit by war. I believed, on the information that was given to me in 1916, that some of the nations were anxious for peace and would welcome a demonstration for peace. It was in the hope that this was true that I financed the expedition to Stockholm in what has since been called the "Peace Ship." I do not regret the attempt. The mere fact that it failed is not, to me, conclusive proof that it was not worth trying. We learn more from our failures than from our successes. What I learned on that trip was worth the time and the money expended. I do not now know whether the information as conveyed to me was true or false. I do not care. But I think everyone will agree that if it had been possible to end the war in 1916 the world would be better off than it is to-day.
For the victors wasted themselves in winning, and the vanquished in resisting. Nobody got an advantage, honourable or dishonourable, out of that war. I had hoped, finally, when the United States entered the war, that it might be a war to end wars, but now I know that wars do not end wars any more than an extraordinarily large conflagration does away with the fire hazard. When our country entered the war, it became the duty of every citizen to do his utmost toward seeing through to the end that which we had undertaken. I believe that it is the duty of the man who opposes war to oppose going to war up until the time of its actual declaration. My opposition to war is not based upon pacifist or non-resistant principles. It may be that the present state of civilization is such that certain international questions cannot be discussed; it may be that they have to be fought out. But the fighting never settles the question. It only gets the participants around to a frame of mind where they will agree to discuss what they were fighting about.
Once we were in the war, every facility of the Ford industries was put at the disposal of the Government. We had, up to the time of the declaration of war, absolutely refused to take war orders from the foreign belligerents. It is entirely out of keeping with the principles of our business to disturb the routine of our production unless in an emergency. It is at variance with our human principles to aid either side in a war in which our country was not involved. These principles had no application, once the United States entered the war. From April, 1917, until November, 1918, our factory worked practically exclusively for the Government. Of course we made cars and parts and special delivery trucks and ambulances as a part of our general production, but we also made many other articles that were more or less new to us. We made 2 1/2-ton and 6-ton trucks. We made Liberty motors in great quantities, aero cylinders, 1.55 Mm. and 4.7 Mm. caissons. We made listening devices, steel helmets (both at Highland Park and Philadelphia), and Eagle Boats, and we did a large amount of experimental work on armour plate, compensators, and body armour. For the Eagle Boats we put up a special plant on the River Rouge site. These boats were designed to combat the submarines. They were 204 feet long, made of steel, and one of the conditions precedent to their building was that their construction should not interfere with any other line of war production and also that they be delivered quickly. The design was worked out by the Navy Department. On December 22, 1917, I offered to build the boats for the Navy. The discussion terminated on January 15, 1918, when the Navy Department awarded the contract to the Ford Company.
On July 11th, the first completed boat was launched. We made both the hulls and the engines, and not a forging or a rolled beam entered into the construction of other than the engine. We stamped the hulls entirely out of sheet steel. They were built indoors. In four months we ran up a building at the River Rouge a third of a mile long, 350 feet wide, and 100 feet high, covering more than thirteen acres. These boats were not built by marine engineers. They were built simply by applying our production principles to a new product.
With the Armistice, we at once dropped the war and went back to peace.
An able man is a man who can do things, and his ability to do things is dependent on what he has in him. What he has in him depends on what he started with and what he has done to increase and discipline it.
An educated man is not one whose memory is trained to carry a few dates in history--he is one who can accomplish things. A man who cannot think is not an educated man however many college degrees he may have acquired. Thinking is the hardest work any one can do--which is probably the reason why we have so few thinkers. There are two extremes to be avoided: one is the attitude of contempt toward education, the other is the tragic snobbery of assuming that marching through an educational system is a sure cure for ignorance and mediocrity. You cannot learn in any school what the world is going to do next year, but you can learn some of the things which the world has tried to do in former years, and where it failed and where it succeeded. If education consisted in warning the young student away from some of the false theories on which men have tried to build, so that he may be saved the loss of the time in finding out by bitter experience, its good would be unquestioned. An education which consists of signposts indicating the failure and the fallacies of the past doubtless would be very useful. It is not education just to possess the theories of a lot of professors.
Speculation is very interesting, and sometimes profitable, but it is not education. To be learned in science to-day is merely to be aware of a hundred theories that have not been proved. And not to know what those theories are is to be "uneducated," "ignorant," and so forth. If knowledge of guesses is learning, then one may become learned by the simple expedient of making his own guesses. And by the same token he can dub the rest of the world "ignorant" because it does not know what his guesses are. But the best that education can do for a man is to put him in possession of his powers, give him control of the tools with which destiny has endowed him, and teach him how to think. The college renders its best service as an intellectual gymnasium, in which mental muscle is developed and the student strengthened to do what he can. To say, however, that mental gymnastics can be had only in college is not true, as every educator knows. A man's real education begins after he has left school. True education is gained through the discipline of life.
There are many kinds of knowledge, and it depends on what crowd you happen to be in, or how the fashions of the day happen to run, which kind of knowledge, is most respected at the moment. There are fashions in knowledge, just as there are in everything else. When some of us were lads, knowledge used to be limited to the Bible. There were certain men in the neighbourhood who knew the Book thoroughly, and they were looked up to and respected. Biblical knowledge was highly valued then. But nowadays it is doubtful whether deep acquaintance with the Bible would be sufficient to win a man a name for learning.
Knowledge, to my mind, is something that in the past somebody knew and left in a form which enables all who will to obtain it. If a man is born with normal human faculties, if he is equipped with enough ability to use the tools which we call "letters" in reading or writing, there is no knowledge within the possession of the race that he cannot have--if he wants it! The only reason why every man does not know everything that the human mind has ever learned is that no one has ever yet found it worth while to know that much. Men satisfy their minds more by finding out things for themselves than by heaping together the things which somebody else has found out. You can go out and gather knowledge all your life, and with all your gathering you will not catch up even with your own times. You may fill your head with all the "facts" of all the ages, and your head may be just an overloaded fact-box when you get through. The point is this: Great piles of knowledge in the head are not the same as mental activity. A man may be very learned and very useless.
And then again, a man may be unlearned and very useful.
The object of education is not to fill a man's mind with facts; it is to teach him how to use his mind in thinking. And it often happens that a man can think better if he is not hampered by the knowledge of the past.
It is a very human tendency to think that what mankind does not yet know no one can learn. And yet it must be perfectly clear to everyone that the past learning of mankind cannot be allowed to hinder our future learning. Mankind has not gone so very far when you measure its progress against the knowledge that is yet to be gained--the secrets that are yet to be learned.
One good way to hinder progress is to fill a man's head with all the learning of the past; it makes him feel that because his head is full, there is nothing more to learn. Merely gathering knowledge may become the most useless work a man can do. What can you do to help and heal the world? That is the educational test. If a man can hold up his own end, he counts for one. If he can help ten or a hundred or a thousand other men hold up their ends, he counts for more. He may be quite rusty on many things that inhabit the realm of print, but he is a learned man just the same. When a man is master of his own sphere, whatever it may be, he has won his degree--he has entered the realm of wisdom.
The work which we describe as Studies in the Jewish Question, and which is variously described by antagonists as "the Jewish campaign," "the attack on the Jews," "the anti-Semitic pogrom," and so forth, needs no explanation to those who have followed it. Its motives and purposes must be judged by the work itself. It is offered as a contribution to a question which deeply affects the country, a question which is racial at its source, and which concerns influences and ideals rather than persons. Our statements must be judged by candid readers who are intelligent enough to lay our words alongside life as they are able to observe it. If our word and their observation agree, the case is made.
It is perfectly silly to begin to damn us before it has been shown that our statements are baseless or reckless. The first item to be considered is the truth of what we have set forth. And that is precisely the item which our critics choose to evade.
Readers of our articles will see at once that we are not actuated by any kind of prejudice, except it may be a prejudice in favor of the principles which have made our civilization. There had been observed in this country certain streams of influence which were causing a marked deterioration in our literature, amusements, and social conduct; business was departing from its old-time substantial soundness; a general letting down of standards was felt everywhere. It was not the robust coarseness of the white man, the rude indelicacy, say, of Shakespeare's characters, but a nasty Orientalism which has insidiously affected every channel of expression--and to such an extent that it was time to challenge it. The fact that these influences are all traceable to one racial source is a fact to be reckoned with, not by us only, but by the intelligent people of the race in question. It is entirely creditable to them that steps have been taken by them to remove their protection from the more flagrant violators of American hospitality, but there is still room to discard outworn ideas of racial superiority maintained by economic or intellectually subversive warfare upon Christian society.
Our work does not pretend to say the last word on the Jew in America. It says only the word which describes his obvious present impress on the country. When that impress is changed, the report of it can be changed.
For the present, then, the question is wholly in the Jews' hands. If they are as wise as they claim to be, they will labour to make Jews American, instead of labouring to make America Jewish. The genius of the United States of America is Christian in the broadest sense, and its destiny is to remain Christian. This carries no sectarian meaning with it, but relates to a basic principle which differs from other principles in that it provides for liberty with morality, and pledges society to a code of relations based on fundamental Christian conceptions of human rights and duties.
As for prejudice or hatred against persons, that is neither American nor Christian. Our opposition is only to ideas, false ideas, which are sapping the moral stamina of the people. These ideas proceed from easily identified sources, they are promulgated by easily discoverable methods; and they are controlled by mere exposure. We have simply used the method of exposure. When people learn to identify the source and nature of the influence swirling around them, it is sufficient. Let the American people once understand that it is not natural degeneracy, but calculated subversion that afflicts us, and they are safe. The explanation is the cure.
This work was taken up without personal motives. When it reached a stage where we believed the American people could grasp the key, we let it rest for the time. Our enemies say that we began it for revenge and that we laid it down in fear. Time will show that our critics are merely dealing in evasion because they dare not tackle the main question. Time will also show that we are better friends to the Jews' best interests than are those who praise them to their faces and criticize them behind their backs.
CHAPTER XVIII
DEMOCRACY AND INDUSTRY
Perhaps no word is more overworked nowadays than the word "democracy,"
and those who shout loudest about it, I think, as a rule, want it least.
I am always suspicious of men who speak glibly of democracy. I wonder if they want to set up some kind of a despotism or if they want to have somebody do for them what they ought to do for themselves. I am for the kind of democracy that gives to each an equal chance according to his ability. I think if we give more attention to serving our fellows we shall have less concern with the empty forms of government and more concern with the things to be done. Thinking of service, we shall not bother about good feeling in industry or life; we shall not bother about masses and classes, or closed and open shops, and such matters as have nothing at all to do with the real business of living. We can get down to facts. We stand in need of facts.
It is a shock when the mind awakens to the fact that not all of humanity is human--that whole groups of people do not regard others with humane feelings. Great efforts have been made to have this appear as the attitude of a class, but it is really the attitude of all "classes," in so far as they are swayed by the false notion of "classes." Before, when it was the constant effort of propaganda to make the people believe that it was only the "rich" who were without humane feelings, the opinion became general that among the "poor" the humane virtues flourished.
But the "rich" and the "poor" are both very small minorities, and you cannot classify society under such heads. There are not enough "rich"
and there are not enough "poor" to serve the purpose of such classification. Rich men have become poor without changing their natures, and poor men have become rich, and the problem has not been affected by it.
Between the rich and the poor is the great mass of the people who are neither rich nor poor. A society made up exclusively of millionaires would not be different from our present society; some of the millionaires would have to raise wheat and bake bread and make machinery and run trains--else they would all starve to death. Someone must do the work. Really we have no fixed classes. We have men who will work and men who will not. Most of the "classes" that one reads about are purely fictional. Take certain capitalist papers. You will be amazed by some of the statements about the labouring class. We who have been and still are a part of the labouring class know that the statements are untrue. Take certain of the labour papers. You are equally amazed by some of the statements they make about "capitalists." And yet on both sides there is a grain of truth. The man who is a capitalist and nothing else, who gambles with the fruits of other men's labours, deserves all that is said against him. He is in precisely the same class as the cheap gambler who cheats workingmen out of their wages. The statements we read about the labouring class in the capitalistic press are seldom written by managers of great industries, but by a class of writers who are writing what they think will please their employers. They write what they imagine will please. Examine the labour press and you will find another class of writers who similarly seek to tickle the prejudices which they conceive the labouring man to have. Both kinds of writers are mere propagandists. And propaganda that does not spread facts is self-destructive. And it should be. You cannot preach patriotism to men for the purpose of getting them to stand still while you rob them--and get away with that kind of preaching very long. You cannot preach the duty of working hard and producing plentifully, and make that a screen for an additional profit to yourself. And neither can the worker conceal the lack of a day's work by a phrase.
Undoubtedly the employing class possesses facts which the employed ought to have in order to construct sound opinions and pass fair judgments.
Undoubtedly the employed possess facts which are equally important to the employer. It is extremely doubtful, however, if either side has all the facts. And this is where propaganda, even if it were possible for it to be entirely successful, is defective. It is not desirable that one set of ideas be "put over" on a class holding another set of ideas. What we really need is to get all the ideas together and construct from them.
Take, for instance, this whole matter of union labour and the right to strike.
The only strong group of union men in the country is the group that draws salaries from the unions. Some of them are very rich. Some of them are interested in influencing the affairs of our large institutions of finance. Others are so extreme in their so-called socialism that they border on Bolshevism and anarchism--their union salaries liberating them from the necessity of work so that they can devote their energies to subversive propaganda. All of them enjoy a certain prestige and power which, in the natural course of competition, they could not otherwise have won.
If the official personnel of the labour unions were as strong, as honest, as decent, and as plainly wise as the bulk of the men who make up the membership, the whole movement would have taken on a different complexion these last few years. But this official personnel, in the main--there are notable exceptions--has not devoted itself to an alliance with the naturally strong qualities of the workingman; it has rather devoted itself to playing upon his weaknesses, principally upon the weaknesses of that newly arrived portion of the population which does not yet know what Americanism is, and which never will know if left to the tutelage of their local union leaders.
The workingmen, except those few who have been inoculated with the fallacious doctrine of "the class war" and who have accepted the philosophy that progress consists in fomenting discord in industry ("When you get your $12 a day, don't stop at that. Agitate for $14. When you get your eight hours a day, don't be a fool and grow contented; agitate for six hours. Start something! Always start something!"), have the plain sense which enables them to recognize that with principles accepted and observed, conditions change. The union leaders have never seen that. They wish conditions to remain as they are, conditions of injustice, provocation, strikes, bad feeling, and crippled national life. Else where would be the need for union officers? Every strike is a new argument for them; they point to it and say, "You see! You still need us."
The only true labour leader is the one who leads labour to work and to wages, and not the leader who leads labour to strikes, sabotage, and starvation. The union of labour which is coming to the fore in this country is the union of all whose interests are interdependent--whose interests are altogether dependent on the usefulness and efficiency of the service they render.
There is a change coming. When the union of "union leaders" disappears, with it will go the union of blind bosses--bosses who never did a decent thing for their employees until they were compelled. If the blind boss was a disease, the selfish union leader was the antidote. When the union leader became the disease, the blind boss became the antidote. Both are misfits, both are out of place in well-organized society. And they are both disappearing together.
It is the blind boss whose voice is heard to-day saying, "Now is the time to smash labour, we've got them on the run." That voice is going down to silence with the voice that preaches "class war." The producers--from the men at the drawing board to the men on the moulding floor--have gotten together in a real union, and they will handle their own affairs henceforth.
The exploitation of dissatisfaction is an established business to-day.
Its object is not to settle anything, nor to get anything done, but to keep dissatisfaction in existence. And the instruments used to do this are a whole set of false theories and promises which can never be fulfilled as long as the earth remains what it is.
I am not opposed to labour organization. I am not opposed to any sort of organization that makes for progress. It is organizing to limit production--whether by employers or by workers--that matters.