Free Big Money by John Dos Passos

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.
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    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.
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    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.
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    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,
    â€œI 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.
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    Henry Ford as an old