◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

PART ONE The Method I am Henry Ford. Born on a farm in Michigan, 1863. Died in Dearborn, 1947. The river flooded that night and killed the power on my own estate — so the man who put America on wheels and light in its houses went out by candlelight. I made the automobile a thing the common man could own. I paid five dollars a day when other men paid two, and I will let no one take that from me. I built the modern world. I also helped build the thing that tried to end it. I will break this yawp into two parts, manufacturing it with the same assembly line process that made the Ford Model T. The first part is about how I made things. I did not invent the car. I did not invent the assembly line. What I understood better than any man alive was scale. Take a thing. Break it into the smallest possible motions. Make each motion identical, repeatable, stripped of everything human, everything that thinks. Then run it a million times without variation. That is the method. That is the whole of my genius, and it built America. And it will do the same to anything you feed it. Anything at all. Feed it steel and you get the Model T. Fifteen million of them, every one the same, until a country that traveled by horse could not remember the horse. Before me, the automobile was a rich man's toy — a novelty for the gentleman with a driver. I made it cost less than a good team of horses. I put a nation on wheels: the farmer, the clerk, the girl who wanted to leave the town she was born in and now could. Do not let anyone tell you that was nothing. That was freedom, and I manufactured it. Feed it labor and you get the modern worker. And here I will tell you the truth the other industrialists were too polite to say. I did not want the whole man. I wanted the hands. The man came attached to the hands, and this was an inconvenience. So I designed the work so the man was not necessary — so that any man, or no man, could stand at that station and perform that motion, and the line would not know the difference. I broke the work into pieces too small to take pride in. Nine hundred men doing one motion each, and not one of them able to say: I made that. They fled. The turnover was such that I had to hire ten men to keep one. So I doubled the wage. Five dollars a day, and the whole world called me a friend of the workingman, and I let them. Understand what it really was. The wage was the price of their staying. I bought the man's day and I bought his boredom, and I called it progress — and it was progress, and something in him died at that station, and both of those are true, and I never lost a night's sleep over either. That is what I built. The car. The wage. The man who makes them. Hold it up and look at how much of it is good. In part two I will show you the fourth thing I manufactured — with the same method, and the same pride. And you will have to decide what to do with the fact that it came out of the same mind. PART TWO The Same Machine I am Henry Ford again. In the first of these I showed you what I built — the car, the wage, the modern worker — and I told you the method. Break it small. Make it identical. Run it a million times. Now I will show you the fourth thing I fed into it. And you will see the machine does not care. I fed it hatred, and out came the same clean, identical, endless product. I owned a newspaper. The Dearborn Independent. I put it in every one of my dealerships — half a million copies a week, into the hands of men who came to buy a car and left with something else. I took the oldest, filthiest hatred in the Western world — the blaming of the Jew — and I did to it what I had done to the automobile. I broke it into simple repeatable pieces a tired man could absorb without thinking, and I ran it, week after week, identical, at a scale no hatred in history had ever achieved. I mass-produced it the way I mass-produced the car, and with the same pride, and it worked exactly as well. They read it in Germany. A young man there kept my portrait on his wall and praised me by name in his book. That country pinned its highest honor for a foreigner on my chest, and I took it. You would like me to say I did not understand what I was feeding. I understood scale better than any man alive. I knew precisely what I was doing. Now hear the thing I came back to make you see. It is not that I was good and also bad. That is a child's arithmetic, and it lets you off. The genius that gave the common man a car and the genius that gave the mob a scapegoat were not two Fords. They were one Ford. One method. One machine. Scale does not know what you have put into it. It multiplies whatever it is given — and it multiplies a lie exactly as faithfully as it multiplies a Model T. More faithfully. A lie has no moving parts to wear out. So look at what carries your hatreds now. It does what my newspaper did, only faster than I ever dreamed — the oldest lie run a million times a second into the tired and the frightened. It does not know the difference between selling a man a car and selling him an enemy. It does not care. I built the first version by hand. You were born inside the finished one. I was not a monster from another age. I was the most modern man who ever lived. I am the shape of the thing you are still standing in. You are waiting for me to tell you how to get free of it. To say: be the exception. Be the grain of sand in the gears. That is what you want from a dead man — absolution, and an exit, and the flattery of believing you would have been the one who refused. I am not here for that. I never built an exit. An exit is a defect, and I spent my life eliminating defects. The variation does not survive the line. That is not cruelty. That is engineering. The man who stopped to ask what was being made — I replaced him by Thursday, and the line did not slow, and nobody remembered his name, and the cars kept coming, and they were good cars. I built the world you are standing in. I am not sorry. I would do all of it again — the car, the wage, the newspaper — the same way, at the same scale. Take your station. The line is moving.