John Passos - Big Money

Two years later Ford’s was manufacturing munitions, Eagle boats; Henry Ford was planning oneman tanks, and oneman subma rines like the one tried out in the Revolutionary War. He announced to the press that he’d turn over his war profits to the government,

but there’s no record that he ever did.

One thing he brought back from his trip

was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

He started a campaign to enlighten the world in the Dearborn Independent;

the Jews were why the world wasn’t like Wayne County, Michigan, in the old horse and buggy days; the Jews had started the war, Bolshevism, Darwinism, Marxism, Nietzsche, short skirts and lipstick. They were behind Wall Street and the international bankers, and the whiteslave traffic and the movies and the Supreme Court and ragtime and the illegal liquor business.

Henry Ford denounced the Jews and ran for senator and sued the Chicago Tribune for libel,

and was the laughingstock of the kept metropolitan press;

but when the metropolitan bankers tried to horn in on his business

he thoroughly outsmarted them.

In 1918 he had borrowed on notes to buy out his minority stockholders for the picayune sum of seventyfive million dollars.

In February, 1920, he needed cash to pay off some of these notes that were coming due. A banker is supposed to have called on him and offered him every facility if the bankers’ representative could be made a member of the board of directors. Henry Ford handed the banker his hat,

and went about raising the money in his own way:

he shipped every car and part he had in his plant to his dealers and demanded immediate cash payment. Let the other fellow do the borrowing had always been a cardinal principle. He shut down production and canceled all orders from the supplyfirms. Many dealers were ruined, many supplyfirms failed, but when he reopened his plant,

he owned it absolutely,

the way a man owns an unmortgaged farm with the taxes paid up.

In 1922 there started the Ford boom for President (high wages, waterpower, industry scattered to the small towns) that was skillfully pricked behind the scenes

by another crackerbarrel philosopher,

Calvin Coolidge;

but in 1922 Henry Ford sold one million three hundred and thirtytwo thousand two hundred and nine tin lizzies; he was the richest man in the world.

Good roads had followed the narrow ruts made in the mud by the Model T. The great automotive boom was on. At Ford’s production was improving all the time; less waste, more spotters, strawbosses, stoolpigeons (fifteen minutes for lunch, three minutes to go to the toilet, the Taylorized speedup everywhere, reach under, adjust washer, screw down bolt, shove in cotterpin, reachunder adjustwasher, screwdown bolt, reachunderadjustscrewdownreachunder adjust until every ounce of life was sucked off into production and at night the workmen went home grey shaking husks).

Ford owned every detail of the process from the ore in the hills until the car rolled off the end of the assemblyline under its own power, the plants were rationalized to the last tenthousandth of an inch as measured by the Johansen scale;

in 1926 the production cycle was reduced to eightyone hours from the ore in the mine to the finished salable car proceeding under its own power,

but the Model T was obsolete.

New Era prosperity and the American Plan

(there were strings to it, always there were strings to it)

had killed Tin Lizzie.

Ford’s was just one of many automobile plants.

When the stockmarket bubble burst,

Mr. Ford the crackerbarrel philosopher said jubilantly,

“I told you so.

Serves you right for gambling and getting in debt.

The country is sound.”

But when the country on cracked shoes, in frayed trousers, belts tightened over hollow bellies,

idle hands cracked and chapped with the cold of that coldest March day of 1932,

started marching from Detroit to Dearborn, asking for work and the American Plan, all they could think of at Ford’s was machineguns.

The country was sound, but they mowed the marchers down.

They shot four of them dead.

Henry Ford as an old man

is a passionate antiquarian,

(lives besieged on his father’s farm embedded in an estate of thousands of millionaire acres, protected by an army of servicemen, secretaries, secret agents, dicks under orders of an English exprizefighter,

always afraid of the feet in broken shoes on the roads, afraid the gangs will kidnap his grandchildren,

that a crank will shoot him,

that Change and the idle hands out of work will break through the gates and the high fences;

protected by a private army against

the new America of starved children and hollow bellies and cracked shoes stamping on souplines,

that has swallowed up the old thrifty farmlands

of Wayne County, Michigan,

as if they had never been).

Henry Ford as an old man

is a passionate antiquarian.

He rebuilt his father’s farmhouse and put it back exactly in the state he remembered it in as a boy. He built a village of museums for buggies, sleighs, coaches, old plows, waterwheels, obsolete models of motorcars. He scoured the country for fiddlers to play oldfashioned squaredances.

Even old taverns he bought and put back into their original shape, as well as Thomas Edison’s early laboratories.

When he bought the Wayside Inn near Sudbury, Massachusetts, he had the new highway where the newmodel cars roared and slithered and hissed oilily past (the new noise of the automobile) ,

moved away from the door,

put back the old bad road,

so that everything might be

the way it used to be,

in the days of horses and buggies.

Jack o’ Diamonds Jack o’ Diamonds

You rob my pocket of silver and gold

WITNESSES OF MYSTERY IN SLUSH PROBE

Philadelphian Beaten to Death in His Room

the men who the workers had been told a short year before were fighting their battle for democracy upon the bloodstained fields of France and whom they had been urged to support by giving the last of their strength to the work of production — these men were coming to teach them democracy and with them came their instruments of murder, their automatic rifles, their machineguns, their cannon that could clear a street two miles long in a few minutes and the helmets that the workers of Gary had produced

Yes we have no bananas

We have no bananas today

TRACTION RING KILLS BUS BILL

Drunken Troops in Skirts Dance as Houses Burn

GIRL SUICIDE WAS FRIEND OF OLIVE THOMAS

Kills Self Despite Wife Who Goes Mad

SEEKS FACTS OF HUNT FOR CASH IN THE EAST

the business consists in large part of financing manufacturers and merchants by purchasing evidences of indebtedness arising from the sale of a large variety of naturally marketed products such as automobiles, electrical appliances, machinery

“Misser Andson Misser Andson, telegram for Misser Andson.” Charley held out his hand for the telegram, and standing in the swaying aisle read the strips of letters pasted on the paper: DOWN WITH FLU WIRE ME ADDRESS SEE YOU NEXT WEEK JOE. “A hell of a note,” he kept saying to himself as he wormed his way back to his seat past women closing up their bags, a greyhaired man getting into his overcoat, the porter loaded with suitcases. “A hell of a note.” The train was already slowing down for the Grand Central.

It was quiet on the grey underground platform when he stepped out of the stuffy pullman and took his bag from the porter, lonely-looking. He walked up the incline swinging his heavy suitcase. The train had given him a headache. The station was so big it didn’t have the crowded look he’d remembered New York had. Through the thick glass of the huge arched windows he could see rain streaking the buildings opposite. Roaming round the station, not knowing which way to go, he found himself looking in the window of a lunchroom.