(5 of 6)
The only thing he was leary about was that the $5 might be squandered. He set up a Sociological Department, over which he installed the Rev. Samuel S. Marquis, gentle, earnest dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in Detroit. Dean Marquis' job was to see that the extra pay went only for better homes, milk, fruit, vegetables, and Ford cars — not for liquor and riotous living. Ford declared: "I want the whole organization dominated by a just, generous and humane policy."
Then came intensified competition, technological improvements, unemployment, labor organizers. The organizers did not agree with Mr. Ford that his simple answer was satisfactory. They said that men wanted more than good wages, they want job security and good working conditions.
Said Ford: "I pity the poor fellow who is so soft and flabby that he must always have 'an atmosphere of good feeling' around him before he can do his work. ... It was about then that he decided the times called for a Harry Bennett. The Makings. At this week's end, Henry Ford was on his plantation in Ways, Ga., where he spends his winters, keeping in touch by telephone with Harry Bennett, who was in charge of the situation at Dearborn.
Mr. Ford's plantation covers 85,000 historic Georgia acres, includes eight original plantations and an old Confederate fort (Fort McAlister). The land was in the path of Sherman's march to the sea. What Sherman destroyed, Ford has restored. Still agile, wiry, taller looking than he is, he putters around his 100-acre lettuce patch, his cane fields and his sweet potatoes, occasionally attends a square dance at his Community House, watches the white-tailed deer, wild turkeys, quail, which live in peace, safe from hunters.
His neighbors are Georgia Crackers, whom he permits to dwell on his acres under an ancient kind of feudal patronage. They are allowed to work in the sawmill, the general store, the nursery. There are garden plots for families, schools for children. Ford and the colonists like to think of the project as selfsupporting. Actually, the plantation has a weekly payroll of $7,000 and Mr. Ford puts in another $50,000 a year for upkeep.
It was nothing new for Henry Ford to be in the midst of conflict. He had been in many a conflict before. For years he had waged a legal war over his alleged infringement of the Selden engine patents, and won it. The interests who had been behind that suit, he was convinced, had been fighting him ever since, in the guise of bankers, or labor unions. There was the libel suit he had brought against the Chicago Tribune for calling him an "anarchist"—when he collected damages of 6¢. And there was the campaign he had launched against international Jewry through the pages of the Dearborn Independent, a campaign he retracted in 1927.
Like the antiques he had collected and stored away at Greenfield, Individualist Ford had stored away his conflict-tested convictions on a thousand matters, great and small. "We reincarnate over and over. We live many lives and store up much experience." From time to time he had given the world the benefit of Henry Ford's experience :