Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  —The clarinet.

  —The oboe.

  —The clarinet.

  They had reached the same impasse as those telegrams between first cousins beginning “Dear Willie” and “Dear Nicky,” concerning the reining-in of Franz Josef and the Serbs.

  —The oboe, although from eight stories up, I can see how you might have confused the two. Still, we’ve got to be accurate in these matters, as I can tell you, having chased a few mirages down in my time.

  Mays was too excited, exhausted, or deflated to ask the obligatory “Do you know her?” He sat passively as Bullock once more rooted through the mass of printed matter on his desk. This time Lenny removed a few journals, exposing some books hidden in a second rank behind them. He removed a fat volume, one of those Bluff Your Way Through the Great Personalities of the Last Hundred Years books. Each page carried a small biography and a glossy photograph. Stockbroking, primarily sales work, meant coddling the client’s special interests, whether Dizzy Dean or William Dean Howells, Bill or Bertrand Russell, knowing all the right people, even if all the right people were already dead. That, then, was why Mays was such a problem case for Bullock: until now, Peter had been remarkably indifferent to the cult of modern personalities.

  —Here we are. Take a good look at this photo. Unless I’m wrong, this ought to look mildly familiar.

  It did. It was Mays’s mirage, or very close to the image still in his mind after months of embellishing. The black-and-white photograph of poor quality, probably from the turn of the century, showed a beautiful woman lying in a coffin, her arms crossed over her breasts. Even in black and white, her hair seemed a strawberry mop.

  For all her familiarity, Mays still could not name the woman. He glanced to the opposite page, cheating on one more test that chance and the past had thrown his way: Sarah Bernhardt, French actress and perhaps the most famous woman in the world at her flourishing, asleep, not dead, in a golden coffin given her by an admirer.

  Mays looked up at Bullock in total incomprehension. Bullock, for the first time that meeting, stared directly at the quarry.

  —Come on, Nicky. It’s a perfect afternoon for history.

  Chapter Ten

  Flivvership

  I have the answer, but I don’t yet know how to get it.

  —attributed to the mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss

  Henry ford received the same formal education as Sander—through the fifth grade. Afterward, he was immediately conscripted into farming, the Michigan equivalent of the Siegerland mines. At the end of the last century, the two presented roughly equivalent fates: both crushed the body and snuffed the soul, under either earth or Earth.

  Both Ford and Sander escaped through the machine, though neither did so completely. Both felt a nostalgia for the lost life that would have killed them; at sixty, Sander wrote memoirs of the idyllic mining valley, while the aged Ford complained that no one in the country was minding the farm. Both Sander and Ford, despite their mechanical allegiances, made the Earthbound Man the foremost category in their respective archives of Man in the Twentieth Century.

  Their resemblance stops there. Sander freed himself by developing a peculiarly twentieth-century trade, a technical craft in an age when mechanical know-how was a saving grace. But he never escaped what Walter Benjamin calls “the portraitist’s nostalgia.” Only through the retrospective eyes of a photographer could he embrace the mechanical progress of the times.

  Ford, however, went on record in the year of Sander’s Three farmers . . . saying he “wouldn’t give five cents for all the art in the world.” (His son Edsel made up for this, paying Rivera $25,000 for his factory portrait.) With one exception, Ford’s life brooked no commemoratives; his solution was a machine not of retrospect but of revolutions per minute. His auto and tractor would pull him out of every hole he might come across, transferring the murderous work of his childhood—the demands of farming—onto the machine, thereby reducing the amount of hard labor involved in going from A to B.

  Sander joined vocation to avocation, mastering a satisfying life. Yet his life’s work, Man of the Twentieth Century, like the century itself, remained unmastered. Ford mastered the century early on, becoming the most powerful fifth grader of his day. But in paving his own internal landscape, he went no farther than the science of mass production could take him.

  Of the great Americans of the early century, when the Great Individual theory of history still applied, Ford was the most paradoxical. Morgan, an old creditor, closed an era when he died in 1913. Wilson was an ambivalent Ivy Leaguer. Edison, an ambitious utilitarian, had a bad habit of spitting tobacco juice on the floor. Norris and Dreiser were just journalists with consciences. The Wrights, Dodges, and Firestones were no more complex than today’s garage entrepreneurs. Ford alone remains an enigma, the improbable meeting of pragmatist and idealist, innovator and reactionary, peacemonger and war profiteer. His friend John Burroughs once characterized him:

  Notwithstanding his practical turn of mind, and his mastery of the mechanic arts, he is through and through an idealist. . . . He is tender as a woman, and much more tolerant. He looks like a poet and conducts his life like a philosopher. . . . His car and his tractor engine typify him—not imposing, not complex, less expressive of power and mass than simplicity, adaptability, and universal service.

  The Detroit Saturday Night doubtless would have clumped Burroughs’s appraisal with other cases of Forditis: “What we would like the world to think about Pa.” The Chicago Tribune called him a dangerously ignorant anarchist, and was sued for saying so. Hitler praised him in Mein Kampf as the only American who understood the enormity of the Jewish problem, and escaped litigation.

  Henry evokes not so much admiration or contempt as amazement. He embodies the unsolvable paradox at the heart of modern man. In 1915, with the war well into its second year, while armies of occupation initiated the practice of collective responsibility, Henry Ford arrived at the incredible decision to act as an individual. He planned to dispense with state diplomacy and use the collective will of individuals to end a war that involved, directly or indirectly, every nation on earth.

  For as large as his empire was, it had grown on the principle of mass production—bringing the machine to the worker on the worker’s own good time. The first automated assembly line was a masterpiece of design, revolutionary only in scaling machinery to fit the size and speed of the human worker. In Ford’s boyish industrial dream, the machine catered to the individual both inside the factory and out. He ran the auto plant that produced over 60 percent of the country’s cars as if he were a meddling grandfather. He tried to enforce the sobriety of employees, making his old enemy, the press, comment that the only way to test the breaths of fifty thousand workers was with an assembly line.

  Most of his contemporaries accepted the war, citing Napoleon’s prophecy of 1814 that in a hundred years, the Continent would be all autocratic or all republican. This explanation fed the front and kept the home fires burning. Ford’s peace plans were only a shade more simplistic. He remembered the McGuffey’s Fourth Reader lesson “Things by Their Right Name”: “soldier” by its right name was “murderer.” Europe was making millions of men murderers: a simple problem requiring a simple solution.

  Ford’s solution was nothing if not simple. Fill a large ship full of celebrities, dignitaries, and common folk, and sail it—the firstever “missile for peace”—at the continent of Europe. Once there, the party could serve as a mediating forum for “continuous negotiation,” where the belligerents could work out their grievances civilly. This ship would be organized and funded by private individuals. No nation, state, or collective organization could give it official recognition.

  The Peace Ship probably seemed less crackpot in 1915 than it does today. A widely supported international pacifist movement had been active before the war. Two enormously influential prewar books, Nobel laureate Bertha von Suttner’s Lay Down Your Arms! and Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion convinced ma
ny that sword and ploughshare were of interchangeable alloy. Eternal peace seemed a mere matter of collective, vocal insistence.

  For his own part, Ford had great cause for believing in the power of idealism and individual conviction. Much of the United States and Europe had caught Forditis, a hysteria that left its victims calling for the farmer’s canonization. Ford was universally admired for his Horatio Algerian biography. Admiration became gratitude when he put his car within easy reach of the median income. Gratitude became outright worship when he instituted the unheard-of minimum wage of five dollars a day. The popular poet Edgar Guest rhymed:

  The children laugh when they used to wail and the eyes of parents glow

  With the happiness they used to think only the rich could know.

  And this is the work of Henry Ford—all this the future scan

  And find in him a friend who lived and thought of his fellow man.

  At the peak of Forditis, Ford began to believe his own image as the hero who “thought of his fellow man.” The times found him preparing to mint his own coinage, not to pass off as legal tender but nevertheless preserving the size and material of a Lincoln cent. In place of the Great Emancipator, the coin bore the silhouette of another liberator, the man who made it possible for America to get from A to B sitting down. In place of In God We Trust, the penny—the six cents he was awarded in the Tribune libel suit minus the five cents he wouldn’t give for all of art—bore the inscription Help the Other Fellow.

  Now if the diplomats and heads of state had perpetuated mass, pointless killing of Europe’s young, sustaining the whole thing on a thin, self-supporting tissue of lies, wasn’t it perhaps time, Ford reasoned, that a plain-sense idealist stepped in and put himself in charge of ending the foolishness? Ford was about to help the other fellow with a vengeance.

  In late November of 1915, Ford granted an interview to the Hungarian Rosika Schwimmer and the American Louis P. Lochner. The two had come to ask Ford to aid the peace movement. Before the interview could begin, Ford disconcerted the two with typical midwestern matter-of-factness: “Tell me what to do.” The pacifists had no set program aside from a vague goal of instituting a process of mediation by neutrals. Ford adored just this sort of sketchy problem in engineering, and he leaped on a nervous joke put forward by the American concerning a floating ark of emissaries. A material answer for a material problem: the Peace Ship was born.

  Within days the three chartered a Scandinavian custom liner, the Oscar II, issued invitations to various luminaries, announced a press conference, and arranged a meeting with the President of the United States. An astounded Wilson sat in the White House listening to Ford, whose leg, throughout the meeting, dangled over the arm of a chair. The President thought the whole thing an elaborate joke until Ford insisted he would set sail inside two weeks, with or without the blessings of the United States. Wilson could not be chained to so definitive a course on so little planning. He lauded the principle but could not back the effort. When the meeting ended and the President excused himself, Ford grumbled out loud that the Princeton and Johns Hopkins graduate had shown himself to be “a little man.”

  No minor political setback was about to stop this mission. Ford, with a keen sense of how much history depends on right-sounding jingoes, busied himself with inventing aphorisms, leaving the trip plans to subordinates. He came up with “Let’s get the boys home by Christmas,” but someone pointed out that even if the Oscar II sailed the following day and all Europe agreed to lay down their arms the instant Henry touched shore, such an event would still be logistically impossible. Undaunted, Ford quickly changed the line to “Let’s get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas.”

  Good attendance at the news conference flustered Ford, whose public speeches included one of the shortest on record. Addressing a boys’ scholarship program, he had managed to get out: “Congratulations. I only want to say there’s no such thing as No Chance.” At the Peace Ship promotion, he didn’t do much better, opening:

  A man should always try to do the greatest good for the greatest number, shouldn’t he? . . . We’re going to try to get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas. I’ve chartered a ship, and some of us are going to Europe.

  This press conference touched off an explosion exceeded only by German 420s along the front. The press trotted out irony, ridicule, satire—the showhorses reserved for idealism and revolutionary works of art. The New York Tribune ran its sardonic headline about Ford personally ending the war by Christmas. The New York Herald called the Peace Ship “one of the cruelest jokes of the century,” though the century was only a few years old. The World did one better, resorting to parodic verse:

  I saw a little fordship

  Go chugging out to sea,

  And for a flag

  It bore a tag

  Marked 70 h.p.

  And all the folk aboardship

  Cried “Hail to Hennery!” . . .

  And so, without a quiver

  The dreadful task they dare

  Of teaching peace

  To France and Greece

  And Teuton, Celt, and Bear.

  Ho for the good ship Flivver,

  Propelled by heated air.

  If the mission were as self-evidently obtuse as these judges insisted, there would have been no point in pointing it out so vehemently. The mission would wash up impotently, a shipwreck on Europe’s coast, and that would be an end to it. The journalists seemed to need to sink the mission before it started. Some New York papers were more friendly. The Evening Post praised “his generous act of knight errantry,” saying it would “be acclaimed by thoughtful hundreds of thousands the world over as a bit of American idealism in an hour when the rest of the world has gone mad over war and war preparedness.” The Times said the effort could do “as little harm as good.” Ford’s effort varied with the observer.

  Scores of copy-starved reporters represented the one class that did not unanimously turn down berths on the Oscar II. Of the other invitees, just one of forty-eight state governors sailed, and only a handful of lesser politicians. Turnout was better among the prominent clergy, though none who sailed is today a familiar name. The writers, activists, and speakers who attended were similarly obscure. Teddy Roosevelt declined for the leading figures, calling the venture a travesty that ought to be forcibly stopped. Not one “person of the first rank” chose to cast their lot with the Peace Ship. Jane Addams, who had booked to sail and who alone had given the boat some small credibility, backed off at the last minute, begging illness. Even Ford’s close friend Edison praised the idea publicly, but declined to take part. On the dock at the ship’s send-off, Ford offered him a million dollars to sail. Edison applied more than his usual deafness to the offer.

  Many rejected invitations with a rudeness that placed the Peace Ship on a moral par with the war itself, preferring the hideously destructive to the laughable. Yet others sent florid testimonials, as if well-thought words could replace the body in person. Vachel Lindsay, Luther Burbank, and Helen Keller were particularly eloquent in declining. Besides the core delegates—fewer than twenty workers from various loosely organized peace committees—the ship’s manifest was filled out with businessmen, students, and obscure citizens, representing a cross-section of little Americans everywhere. Less than a couple hundred went to St. Ives, insisting that the ludicrous was better than the bloody.

  Any attempt to evoke world admiration failed when the send-off degenerated into a free-for-all. One passenger took it on himself to serve as a master of ceremonies, generating hoopla and getting the crowd to chant hip-hip-hooray for Ford, the respected clergy, and well-wishing luminaries. When Edison showed, the MC invoked the crowd to give a big hand for “the fellow who makes the light for you to see by.” Two of the departing passengers pulled a stunt of doubtful taste, getting married by the ship captain, to the great delight of the crowd. The marriage was later annulled for having taken place in port. A wisecracking practical joker sent a present of two caged sq
uirrels and a note saying they’d be sure to feel at home on board with the nuts.

  The ship pulled away to brass bands and cheering crowds as if that localized, drunken spot of New Jersey had already signed a separate peace with the entire world. Before the boat got a few hundred yards, an onlooker jumped from shore and swam after it. Fished out by police, he identified himself as “Mr. Zero,” swimming, according to one source, “for public opinion,” and according to another, “to ward off torpedoes.” These details attest to the full attendance of a voracious press corps that, in this year of Serbia’s being overrun, Italy’s entering the war, Germany’s using poison gas for the first time at Ypres, the Lusitania’s sinking, the Gallipoli campaign, Zeppelin bombings, a new British government, major works by Picasso, Lawrence, and Pound, the first great motion picture, Birth of a Nation, and Einstein’s theory of general relativity, had no better use for its time than ridicule.

  The plan to correct social ills with the collective wills of individuals ran into trouble even before it reached the battlefield. That is, the battlefield met it halfway across the Atlantic. Ford began the journey affably enough, scolding a young female passenger for smoking, and telling jokes and homilies over communal meals in the ship’s dining room. Soon, however, begging a sea-induced virus, but more likely suffering from overrealized idealism, he retired to his stateroom into total seclusion. Rumors spread about his illness—he was dying; he was already dead. A gang of reporters broke into his room. They explained to an enraged and healthy Ford that Morgan had been dead six days before anyone knew, and they weren’t going to be scooped on another story that important. And so the ambassadors were left to concoct trouble by themselves without any help from the top.

  At first the traveling journalists complained of a lack of newsworthy events aboard ship. They radioed back bland tidbits about the diet, fashion, and pastimes of the peace pilgrims. Then came the first major meeting. The representatives agreed to draft a manifesto summarizing their beliefs and outlining their platform for action. One might marvel that such a document wasn’t drafted long before Mr. Zero chased the boat out of Jersey. But then, Trois Vierges hadn’t waited for manifestos explaining the need for war.