Henry Ford's Place in History

And a Glimpse of the Coming Race of Giants in America

JOHN JAY CHAPMAN

MR. HENRY FORD is the advance guard of American education. He has already attained to that pitch of ignorance which the educated American will arrive at twenty-five or perhaps fifty years hence. He knows nothing about history or language or geography or literature; but he is a good fellow and successful man

Now, if you will examine our colleges, you will find that for many years they have been striving to produce this type of man. Good feeling and success are the beau ideals of our educators.

President Lowell and President Hadley lie awake at night muttering, "Good fellowship and success: fifteen millions will do it." . . .

President Hadley grinds his teeth in his bed because Harvard has been stealing Yale's trade-mark. The Harvard man is becoming known as a friendly person, a sort of rough diamond or movie-hero, whose hands are crooked from catching baseballs, but who would be sure to save you if you fell out of a canoe.

The commercial value of this ideal was discovered by Yale years and years ago. And now Harvard is cutting into the trade. This is unfair; because it required a kind of genius to foresee that the ideal of academic ignorance (toward which both colleges were tending) required to be balanced up by muscle and crude benevolence.

The genius of Yale perceived this as long ago as 1880, while Harvard was still nursing in her sons the idea of wellgroomed effeteness and gentlemanly nonchalance. But in about 1895 the pangs of self-interest awakened Harvard to the importance of the Yale plan, and she grasped at the Yale type as a hen rushes at the worm, which her sister hen has had the good fortune to see an instant sooner. Thus, both colleges are today standardised.

But note this:—today Nature herself, as is usual, in such cases, is producing the very man who was foreseen in a vision by the genius of Yale, and was accepted by the intelligent competition of Harvard, viz., the normal American, the supreme type for quantity production—Henry Ford.

The New Model

OF course the old Harvard model of 1850 was scrapped long before the events just noted. That model could never survive today. It would collapse on the roadside and expire unpitied and unsung. Neither Wendell Phillips, nor Charles Sumner nor Phillips Brooks could keep the road today. They could not talk our language nor slap a man on the shoulder, nor make money nor succeed in any sense. They might pick up something in the way of tough manners and hearty modern ways; they might ride in motors and dance tangos; but there is one thing they could never get rid of— their education. They never would be able to discharge their minds of it. The poor devils were simply ruined in early life. . They had read things, they knew things, they had traveled, they were chock-full of rubbish.

Rubbish, I say—history and all that; and the only reason it didn't make failures of them was that every, one else in those days was full of the same dope—rotten with it. Why, Latin—those men could quote Latin. What has Cicero got to do with America anyway, I'd like to know. If Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner had lived in Detroit they'd have died of starvation on the street.

Why? Read your Darwin.

It's being fitted for your surroundings that counts in this world. Henry Ford is fitted for his environment if ever a man was. Only he's premature. Like all reat figures, he's ahead of his age. If he ad been born twenty-five years later, he'd have been chosen as United States senator hands down. His great prophetic figure stands today before all our American colleges as the ideal toward which they grope.

The Evil of General Information

AND now for analysis. It is not Latin and Greek that render a man inefficient; though this is maintained by many. Latin and Greek are mere symbols—a convenient phrase. The evil that today confronts the young American is general information, i. e., anything that isn't business—and his own line of business. If Mr. Ford had known the difference between Benedict Arnold and Arnold Bennett—which he said he didn't —he would never have made his millions. If he had known what forced the American colonists into the Revolutionary War we should have had no cheap tractors. If he had come any nearer to all past history than to size it up as "bunk" to be handed out by a salaried man as fast as the need arose, he would have been a train-hand today. As for art, Mr. Ford can't see much in it. Happy man, honest man, noble, great-hearted American! For all these studies destroy the natural benevolence and rough loving goodness of the American character. They are not merely distractions; they are poisonous, depleting sophistications, anemic influences. Does your practical commercial traveler talk about art ? Could he sell stoves if he did ?

Let us remember that early facility in reading and writing is likely to fill a young person's mind with stuff that never gets out of him. By the time the boy is twelve he's lost. Unless his curiosity is checked he may grow up into a Sumner or a Phillips Brooks, and go wandering about for tne rest of his life like an East Indian saint—in a! machine-shop. Unless it is checked, he won't grow; he will never be the strong, warm, loving, ignorant millionaire for which nature intended him. When I see a young lad looking at an old book, or a good painting, or a poem by John Milton, I say "Never mind; school and college will soon knock all that nonsense out of him."

The Hope of Our Universities

BUT let us not despair.

Our universities are showing true American grit. They have got as far as excluding all ideas and interests that are not special and practical from each student's view-point. A little later on they will see that they must go further. These specialties are too abstract, too theoretic, too antiquated. The most powerful men in the country have got on without them.

I chanced lately to spend a couple of weeks at a great college club where recent graduates congregate; and I must say I was gratified to note the progress which our universities are making in eliminating the unessential from American life. Noble young men by the hundred met here and talked affairs. They looked and spoke like typical commercial travelers. They had that loving frankness peculiar to the New World. Not a general idea or unwholesome bit of general information about the past had sifted into them. These boys live in the present, they talk of today, not even of yesterday, for what is yesterday—to the practical man? They talk business and sport. And, here let me say parenthetically that one of the best influences of sport is that it fills hours which might otherwise be given to drink, dissipation, reading and writing.

Well, these young graduates hadn't read a book since they were twelve, and they spoke the language of Sixth Avenue almost as well as if they had never been to college. They were lovely boys, and, as I knew one of them, I got him to translate the conversation. It turned out that they were discussing Henry Ford's candidacy for the United States Senate and (would you believe it) they were against him. They were laughing at him. They knew that he made a break somehow about the American Revolution, and thought he would disgrace the Senate. Indeed they showed themselves to be tinctured with the cold cynicism of the past. I was shocked. They looked so ingenuous, so American; and yet, in their own minds, they represented an aristocracy of letters and the fine arts. I bowed my head in shame for them, and said reverently to myself, let us not expect all things at once. Time moves on. Ifour country still shows marks of sham cultivation, the varnish is daily growing thinner and coarser. If a man who graduates from one of our colleges today knows the difference beteen Benedict Arnold and Arnold Bennett, we must forgive the teachers, for they know not what they do.

The trend is in the right direction, and, behind all of our universities, there stands the form of Destiny and points her finger towards a signboard, which President Lowell and President Hadley, and our other educators, do not see. But on that board is written in unmistakable letters:

READING AND WRITING ABOLISHED