My Life and Work
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