HENRY FORD'S "PEACE SHIP"

Henry Ford was not only a great manufacturer, he was also something of a missionary, and a rather naive one at that. He believed, for instance, that cars would have, what he called, "a universal effect. We won't have any more strikes or wars."

Ford was also a man of peace, so much so that he once declared that the word "murderer" should be embroidered in red letters across the breast of every soldier, and that he was ready to devote his life and fortune to combat militarism throughout the world. Egging him on was a Jewish Hungarian lady, Rosika Schwimmer, quite a formidable character, who claimed that European leaders she had met had all expressed to her a genuine wish for peace. Records of her conversations with these leaders she carried about in a voluminous black handbag which nobody was allowed to see.

At a meeting of American peace activists in 1915 someone suggested, probably in jest, the idea of chartering a special ship to convey America’s peacemongers to Europe, then engulfed in World War I. But Ford, who had a penchant for foolhardy ideas, took this one in dead earnest. He booked most of the first and second-class accommodation on Oscar II, a vessel of the Scandinavian-American line, due to leave New York shortly.

All Ford’s biographers have spoken about his "peace ship," but no one in greater detail and more effectively than Robert Lacey in his deeply researched, Ford: The Men and the Machine, published by Little, Brown and Company, Boston - Toronto. "It was a grand yet simple gesture," writes Lacey, "that everyone would understand. It cut through all the complexities in appealing and dramatic terms. Henry could see the front pages already."

Alas, it was a grand gesture, but one that was doomed from the very start! It was too visionary and lacked any specific target or purpose. Lacey describes how flabbergasted President Wilson was to be invited aboard the Peace Ship, about which nobody had told him anything, along with members of his family. Wilson naturally hesitated to entrust his personal prestige and his government’s "to the vague, unpredictable fate of Henry’s Peace Ship." Ford was terribly disappointed, but worse disappointments were in store. Even his good friends, Thomas Edison and John Wanamaker, backed out. His wife Clara too flatly refused to accompany her husband.

Nevertheless Ford went ahead. "We'll get the boys in the trenches home by Christmas," was his proud boast. The Press sneered at the idea. Detroit Free Press complained that "repeated questions disclosed not the slightest evidence that Mr. Ford has a definite plan as to what he is going to do when he goes to Europe ... Nobody knew where to go, nobody was in charge of anything, nobody knew anything."

The idea was that the Peace Ship would sail to Norway and then the passengers comprising 55 delegates and 44 journalists would travel by land to the neutral countries: Sweden, Denmark and Holland, and organise lectures and meetings and draft a memo to spread the message of peace. But unfortunately, as often happens, those who preached peace started warring among themselves during the voyage. No decision could be arrived at. The whole enterprise began to seem like a cruel joke.

Then calamity struck. When the ship reached Norway on a bitter December morning in 1915, Ford insisted on walking a good distance to his hotel, reaching which he collapsed and had to be confined to bed. To add to his woes, the project’s Social Director died of pneumonia.

A Don Quixote, without even windmills to tilt at, Ford was so disconcerted and disillusioned that he never mentioned the ill-fated Peace Ship again. But by a happy turn of events, the Press which had derided his idealism, now began to sympathise with him. His friendliness and willingness to spend time with journalists impressed them no end. One Pressman called him "a mechanical genius with the heart of a child." Another went so far as to compare him with Abraham Lincoln, and even to "a sort of inarticulate Christ"! "No matter if he failed," declared The New York American, "he at least TRIED."

Some of Ford’s associates as well as a few biographers tried to pass on the blame for the spectacular disaster to the redoubtable Rosika Schwimmer. But Robert Lacey’s judgement on the entire episode is both frank and fair: "It was Henry’s own decision to attach his name to such flimsy stuff. And the indecent rush with which the Peace Ship was chartered, was his responsibility alone. His developing addiction to personal publicity had led him to confuse genuine action with the more glamorous but empty facsimile of action enshrined in the newspaper headline."

Ford’s peace ship misadventure did not really dent his reputation as the biggest car maker in the world. The 3,90,000 vehicles he produced in the same year as the landing of his Peace ship represented 44.6 per cent of all the cars manufactured in America. His policy of regularly cutting the prices of his cars won him considerable acclaim and was in tune with his manufacturing philosophy that it was better to sell a large number of cars at a reasonably small margin than to sell fewer cars at a large margin of profit.

Courtesy:
The Men and the Machines by Robert Lacey, published by Little, Brown and Company, Boston-Toronto.