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I Invented the Modern Age: The Story of Henry Ford

Our American Stories / Lee Habeeb
The Truth Network Radio
January 20, 2025 3:02 am

I Invented the Modern Age: The Story of Henry Ford

Our American Stories / Lee Habeeb

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January 20, 2025 3:02 am

On this episode of Our American Stories, while Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile, he fundamentally changed the world's relationship with the automobile to what it is today. Here's the story of the man who claimed to have invented the modern age.

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Let's take a listen. Henry Ford is among the strangest and in some ways the least appealing of great men. He spent a great deal of the latter part of his life building on some empty acreage in Dearborn, Michigan a vast museum devoted to American history. Now it's an endlessly fascinating place.

Ford collected on the grandest possible scale. When he revered Thomas Edison all his life I don't think he admired any living person more and he brought Edison's laboratory up from Menlo Park, New Jersey along with the rooming house that Edison's assistants had lived in and seven carloads of New Jersey dirt so the buildings could literally sit on their native soil. And when he went came when he went to get the Wright brothers cycle shop he also brought the pretty little Queen Anne house the brothers had grown up in and it was a wooden building stood on stone foundation.

He had the mortar knocked out between the stones and re-ground so it would be on its same cement. This tells a good deal about his immense capacity for taking pain so the whole museum tells a lot about about the man. It's like walking through Henry Ford's brain and that's a very interesting place to be.

He loved mechanisms of all kind he loved watches so in the village there are three watchmakers but there's no attorney's office there's no nice little country bank because he thought lawyers and bankers were all leeches. And there's something else about that place I felt when when Ford was a young man and all the time he was making working to establish himself he had a magical ability to draw people to him to trust him to to make them work for him and and do it happily. One of his early friends called that the magnet he said no that's Henry he's got the magnet and I felt a dim tug of that magnet's pull all the time I was in his museum um I that and that's what uh made me want to write a book about him. But of course I started the book with considerable trepidation of probably only Abraham Lincoln has been written more about than Henry Ford and this wasn't helped when uh I told a friend what I was going to be writing about and he said isn't that story about as well known as the Nativity?

That's certainly what I'd been worried about but after I spent a while with him I began thinking that maybe the story wasn't also well known after all or actually rather that it was so well known that we don't even realize it was his story. What I mean is that everybody knows the name and the comment about history being made and that he built a lot of cars but the true breadth of his accomplishment is now so much a part of the world we inhabit that his influence is around us like the air we breathe and and as invisible. Every century or so our republic has been remade by a new technology. 170 years ago it was the railroad and in our time it's the microprocessor. These technologies do more than change our habits they change the way we think. Thoreau listening who saw the railroads come in listening to the train steaming past Walden Pond wrote, have not men improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was invented?

Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than ever they did in the stage office? And of course anyone over the age of 20 younger than that and it's simply your environment knows what the computer and the internet are doing now. Well in between the steam locomotive and the mac came Henry Ford's Model T and when Ford was quite quite quite elderly he was speaking with a Dearborn high school boy who was doing a article on him for for the high school newspaper and Ford got very sentimental about the one-room schoolhouse and square dancing and started to talk about how wonderful these old days were and the boy wasn't an easy sell on this and he said well that's all very well Mr. Ford but we live in the modern age. Ford said young man don't tell me about the modern age I invented the modern age. Now you'll notice he didn't say I made a hell of a lot of cars he said basically he had fashioned the world he and the boy were living in and it's it's a crazy preposterous megalomaniac claim and I've come to think it's very largely true. There is a mystery to him certainly his close associates felt so almost every one of his high lieutenants is interesting reading them one after another they all say well we worked on this and we were very close on that but I never really understood him I never understood Mr. Ford nobody called him Henry. The Reverend Samuel Marquis who spent years working with Ford wrote in spite of a long and fairly intimate acquaintance with him I have not one mental picture of which I can say this is the man as he is or as I know him there are in him lights so high and shadows so deep that I cannot get the whole of him in proper focus at the same time. And you're listening to one heck of a story as told by one heck of a storyteller Richard Snow telling the story of Henry Ford when we come back more of the man who invented the modern age here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here the host of Our American Stories every day on this show we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country stories from our big cities and small towns but we truly can't do this show without you our stories are free to listen to but they're not free to make if you love what you hear go to our americanstories.com and click the donate button give a little give a lot go to our americanstories.com and give have you ever wondered what it would be like to have supervision enhanced hearing extraordinary reflexes to be dare we say superhuman well Roku's new pro series tv can't do any of that for you but with a 4k screen side firing speakers and a blazing fast refresh rate it'll sure feel like it elevate your entertainment using all your favorite apps like iHeart and play all your music radio and podcasts with the new Roku pro series your senses aren't better your tv is hello it is Ryan and I was on a flight the other day playing one of my favorite social spin slot 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ford was full of contradictions right from the very start well whatever his mysteries by the time that reporter wrote that 1915 a great many people were trying to figure him out he was on his way to becoming the richest american and once theodore roosevelt died in 1919 he was easily the most famous now this man who lived to read about the atomic bombs falling on japan was born three weeks after the battle of gettysburg july 1863 on a farm in dearborn his father had been born an irish tenant on an irish tenant farm and he always seems to have felt a sort of grateful surprise that he now owned not only a farm of his own but a prosperous one henry felt a little differently he loved everything about the farm except the farming he said my earliest recollection is that considering the results there was too much work on the place that is the way i still feel about farming there are clouds of folklore about ford's boyhood a lot of them sent up by ford himself but it does seem clear that he was very early interested in shifting onto machinery burdens that people had born since biblical times he said even when i was very young i suspected that farm work might somehow be done in a better way that is what took me into mechanics although my mother always said i was a born mechanic he very early began taking things apart to see how they would work and he always got them back together but what he took apart and got back together often ran better a neighbor said that every clock in the ford household shuddered when it saw it coming but he did more harm than good with the clocks and by the time he was 12 he was repairing neighbors watches now the next year when he was 13 his mother died and he expressed the loss and you know the best way he knew how he said the house was like a watch without a mainspring and it was perhaps the nearness of her death that that made him particularly sensitive to the impact of what he called the most important biggest event of my early years his father was driving him into town in his wagon family wagon when they came upon a steam farm engine moving their way here's how clearly ford described it 60 years later i remember that engine as though i had seen it only yesterday for it was the first vehicle other than horse drawn that i had ever seen it was intended primarily for driving threshing machines and sawmills and was simply a portable engine and boiler mounted on wheels i had seen plenty of these engines hauled around by horses but this one had a chain that made a connection between the engine and the rear wheels the engineer was very glad to explain the whole affair he was proud of it he showed me how the chain was disconnected from the propelling wheel and a belt put on to drive the machinery he told me that the engine made 200 revolutions a minute and that the chain pinion could be shifted to let the wagon stop while the engine was still running and here ford so much of her whose early youth is elusive makes a clear and plausible statement of the moment his life took a course that would change everyone else's this last he means the engine running in neutral while not driving the wagon is a feature which is incorporated in the modern automobiles it was not important with steam engines which are easily stopped and started but it became very important with the gasoline engine it was that engine which took me into automotive transportation ford followed that farm engine for the rest of his life my toys were all tools he wrote when he was in his 60s he added and they still are but of course as a teenager he had to learn to use those tools and he couldn't have found himself in a better place to do that detroit had standing timber all around there was lake shipping there was iron ore and the city took advantage of all of this when henry ford turned 17 and left home to go there already had 120 000 residents 10 railroads feeding it and it was home to a thousand different manufacturing businesses little machine shops scattered everywhere now ford spent a few months in business school there and that was the only time in his life when his handwriting was legible but his real education came from the machine shops he held jobs in several of them and impressed everyone he worked with he had an almost instinctive sense of machinery even at the end of his life he could look at 10 identical carburetors laid out on a bench and point to the one that had something wrong with it yeah he loved being among machines but a few years later he was back in dearborn on the farm he'd been lured there by his father with the promise of 40 acres of land and his 80 acres um his father still hoped henry would become a farmer too ford didn't want the farmland but he went because he did want to be perceived as a more stable citizen and the reason he cared about that was because he'd fallen in love with an 18 year old named clara bryant he'd met her at a new year's eve dance he loved dancing all his life and he married her in 1888 and she turned out to be a great choice she was steady and staunch and brave and had such complete faith in him that he took to calling her the great believer and being married to henry can't have been easy for her at first because over the next 10 years they lived in 10 rental houses and all during that time ford was experimenting with creating what with a machine that would do what the steam traction engine had which was drive itself he knew all about steam engines by now and decided they were simply too heavy to power what he had in mind so he began to look to gasoline and the internal combustion engine he started building a car in the woodshed behind his rented house woodshed is makes it sound like too modest the thing it was actually a rather substantial little brick building you can see it or a replica of it today in the greenfield village and it was a lonely and frustrating job because everything had to be built from scratch when ford needed a carburetor he had to invent one he didn't even have a name for it the word hadn't come into the language yet and he worked on his first car for months and felt it was finally ready in june of 1896 and it gives a good idea of the intensity of purpose with which he the concentration with which he worked that it was only when he was ready to take it out on its trial run that he discovered it was too big to fit through the woodshed door well he fixed that with an axe and got his car started and coaxes two-cylinder engine into life and drove off into his future and hours the car worked and he improved it and finally got it running well enough to convince a detroit lumber tycoon to finance what ford called the detroit automobile company and i think it's worth remembering how courageous it was to stake everything on building automobiles in those days years later ford said a very interesting thing about it he said of course there was no demand for an automobile there never is for a new product and you've been listening to richard snow tell the story of henry ford my toys were all tools he recalled they still are and my goodness they were and detroit at the turn of the century we're talking about the 1890s and the time that ford went there and started to work there there were a hundred thousand plus citizens ten railroad lines fed the city and there were all kinds of manufacturing shops and concerns and of course ford well this is living large being amongst all of those people making all of those machines and it's interesting the first 10 years of his marriage 10 separate rentals working on his car for months and as he put it of course there was no demand for the automobile there never is for a new product and he was cutting new ground henry ford when we come back more of the story of the man who invented the modern age here on our american story roku has what you need to make your college home away from home feel more like your own make your dorm the place to be with roku tv or bring a roku streaming stick to easily access all your favorite free and premium content like i heart radio stream your favorite playlist with the roku vibe setting smart light strips to sync your music to millions of colors and make your dorm feel more like you make your dorm the place to be with roku tv and make your dorm the place to be with roku tv streaming players and smart lights head to roku.com or your favorite retailer to deck out your dorm hello it is ryan and i was on a flight the other day playing one of my favorite social spin slot games on chumbacassino.com i looked over the person sitting next to me and you know what they were doing they're also playing chumbacassino everybody's loving having fun with it chumbacassino is home to hundreds of casino style games you can play for free anytime anywhere so sign up now at chumbacassino.com that's chumbacassino.com and live the chumba life sponsored by chumba casino no purchase necessary vgw group void where prohibited by law 18 plus terms wasn't that delicious so good your bill ladies i got it no i got it seriously i insist i insisted first don't be silly you're gonna be silly people with the wells fargo active cash credit card prefer to pay because they earn unlimited two percent cash back on purchases okay rock paper scissors for it rock paper scissors shoot no the wells fargo active cash credit card visit wellsfargo.com active cash terms apply with the best all-inclusive vacation deals to mexico and the caribbean booking your getaway with cheap caribbean vacations means you have more freedom to do your deal whether you want to enjoy snorkeling endless margaritas and more or simply soak up the sun and sand in a tropical paradise cheap caribbean vacations has your deal for that plan and book the exact getaway you want at exactly the right price for you by using our exclusive budget beach finder or find a featured adults only all-inclusive package to seekers resorts and spas and do your deal at cheapcaribbean.com and we continue with our american stories and richard snow the author of i invented the modern age the rise of henry ford let's pick up where we last left off and i think it's worth remembering how courageous it was to stake everything on building automobiles in those days years later ford said a very interesting thing about it he said of course there was no demand for an automobile there never is for a new product that runs totally counter to the old saw about invention being the uh in the necessity being the mother of invention and the father of being the mother of invention and this very often it's exactly the other way around invention being the mother of necessity is uh you know nobody wanted an iphone until they had one in their hand anyway ford got his start comedy started and seems instantly to have lost interest in it i just wandered away wouldn't show up no but nobody knows why perhaps he wasn't quite ready to manufacture cars more likely he resented working for anybody he he he never liked having a boss and um said something that he then went on to ruin a second company and he was still able for a third throw of the dice to find a circle smaller but a real circle of investors for his next enterprise which he found in 1903 with 28 000 capital paid in this one bore his name the ford motor company and it would last now his investors not unreasonably uh wanted the ford motor company to build expensive cars in 1907 the packard gray wolf sports car though that term wouldn't exist for another 40 years costs ten thousand dollars and a nice suburban house might go for eighteen hundred dollars now work that calculation out today and if prices have stayed relative the house would cost maybe 1.2 million and a dodge viper would cost six million dollars so of course it was more desirable to sell something worth thousands of dollars than something worth hundreds of dollars ford believed exactly the opposite make the car cheaper you'll do better selling lots of low-priced cars to farmers and shop clerks than you will a few costly ones to billionaires and the way to achieve this he said told one of the backers of his new company is make one automobile like another automobile just as one pin is like another pin when it comes from a pin factory or a match like another match when it comes from a match factory but how to do it how to do it the car should be simple and durable useful to farmers ford might have hated farming but he loved the farm life or rather the virtues of loyalty and and steadiness that he ordered that he saw in it the car would be fundamental enough for any farm boy to understand and repair rugged enough to negotiate at the truly dreadful roads at the time versatile enough to be hooked up to a bandsaw or a thresher or a pump now by 1904 he was a success but he saw it hidden inside every car he built the ghost of a much greater car and in 1908 he called together his most trusted executives and started designing one in a sealed off room in his factory and here his genius played as strongly and steadily as it ever would and his inherent contradictions deployed themselves only to a creative end a contradictions because the car he was building would be at once as perfectly simple as he could make it and yet immensely sophisticated it would for instance have four cylinders when no inexpensive car had more than two and the engines in multi-cylinder cars tended just to be fussy complicated hard to repair hard to maintain ford wanted his engine machined out of a single block of metal and while his helpers were trying to figure out how to do this ford had another thought slice off the top that is have the engine in a single casting with the uh its four cylinders wholly accessible and then fit the cylinder head on top of it like a hat and bolt that down and that's how car engines are built to this day the steering wheel american cars and all cars was almost and all was on the right uh ancient tradition on that because steam locomotive engineers sat head end right hand in his cabin ford thought it belonged on the left put it there and there it stays unless you're english the materials in the body would be cheap as he could make them but the chassis would be made of vanadium steel which was a light tough very expensive alloy quite new to the united states and he'd run through the alphabet from his first model a and now is currently selling the model s so he named the new car the model t and put it on the market in october of nineteen eight very briefly in 1879 a rochester patent attorney named george of seldon looked at a gasoline engine and thought hey this could make a wagon go and drafted a patent said that it would be attached to the wheels of the car though he didn't say how that would happen and then he sent it into the patent office but in those days you could put off a patent for 17 years by making tiny modifications to your wording and stuff and he kept it alive basically until the automobile was becoming a feasible thing and then incredibly he got a patent on the idea of the automobile and he got money backing him and started to exact ransom from all the car makers even the young general motors finally rolled over and only ford fought him fought on fought him alone patent litigation was extremely expensive ford was spending two dollars a car on the but he stuck it out right till the end and he won and that and that there he got you know he actually got headlines that read things like god bless henry ford now the bottle t is no longer any sort of force in our lives but i think it refuses to look placid or quaint or to acquire that gloss of appeal that uh that time puts on so many ugly things that high young lovely frame and pugnacious snout still flaunt the boxy antiques power to change the world the car was tall because the ruts were deep thanks in part to the vanadium steel it was both tough and light only 1100 pounds and it could scramble over marshy terrain that would immobilize heavier cars for what became so ubiquitous an american fixture it had many eccentricities beginning move what ford called a planetary transmission collector friend of mine who owns the model t told me once that he could leave it parked anywhere nobody would ever steal it because nobody could figure out how to drive it three pedals sprouted from the floor while on the right was the brake the one in the middle put the car in the reverse and the car was put the car in the reverse the one on the left made it go forward and low gear when pressed to the floor and in high gear when released the driving gears were all engaged by bands that these pedals either tightened or loosened but with all those pedals on the floor not one was an accelerator that was a lever on the steering wheel which you thumb downward to feed more gas to the engine and when you wanted to know how much more gas you had to feed you left to feed you stopped climbed out lifted off the front seat cushion unscrewed the gas cap beneath it and poked in the tank with a wooden stick marked like the like a ruler but with gallons instead of inches but for all the fussing the car required it went it went and it was as dependable as a cast iron stove and you're listening to richard snow who's the author of i invented the modern age the rise of henry ford go and buy this book you won't put it down and the importance of ford's courage can't be underestimated no one understood the man that's true he probably didn't understand himself but few would describe ford as anything but courageous and he had the courage of his convictions no doubt as do entrepreneurs throughout history the wright brothers we learned from david mccullough had that same kind of courage and not that manufacturing excellence by the way mass marketing and mass manufacturing airplanes was not in the wheelhouse of the wright brothers and by the way he did what nobody was thinking about back in those early days of automobiles generally everyone was just trying to make expensive cars and here's ford trying to make them affordable and though the model t had many eccentricities it worked and it was as dependable as a cast iron stove when we come back more of the remarkable story of henry ford here on our american stories roku has what you need to make your college home away from home feel more like your own make your dorm the place to be with roku tv or bring a roku streaming stick to easily access all your favorite free and premium content like i heart radio stream your favorite playlist with the roku vibe setting smart light strips to sync your music to millions of colors and make your dorm feel more like you make your dorm the place to be with roku tv streaming players and smart lights head to roku.com or your favorite retailer to deck out your dorm wasn't that delicious so good your bill ladies i got it no i got it seriously i insist i insisted first oh don't be silly you don't be silly people with the wells fargo active cash credit card prefer to pay because they earn unlimited two percent cash back on purchases okay rock paper scissors for it rock paper scissors shoot no the wells fargo active cash credit card visit wellsfargo.com active cash terms apply cheap caribbean is celebrating more than just the new year in 2025 cheap caribbean vacations is celebrating its 25th birthday too you're invited to join in on the birthday fun and book a beach vacation with more savings now through february 3rd you can unlock up to 250 off site-wide vacation packages celebrate these awesome savings at your favorite beach and book your next all-inclusive vacay at cheapcaribbean.com your 250 off is waiting the new year's here it's the perfect time to refresh those household essentials and score some cash back rewards with colgate palmolive from toothpaste to dish soap chances are you've got colgate palmolive products on your shopping list and in your house right now we're talking brands like colgate soft soap 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instructing his lawyer to have him buried in his model t and the lawyer wanted to know the reason for this the man said because i ain't been a hole yet that it couldn't get me out of and when it was time to stay put and do some farm work you could take off a rear wheel and hook it up to a fresher or a sawmill the owner was expected to know how to do that and indeed to maintain the car generally a midwestern man named alfred stevenson who owned the succession of model t's in the 20s wrote about this he said the whole car was simple accessible in the evening you could tighten the bands look at the timer clean the plugs a weekend would do nicely to re-line the bands or grind the valves clean the carbon or maybe tighten the rods a four-day vacation was plenty to overhaul the engine or the rear end if any of these jobs was a bit beyond your experience you had merely to ask your neighbor who not only knew but would come over and help the ramifications of this were far-reaching and frequently unexpected in the second world war for example german tanks were often superior to their american counterparts but that advantage was cancelled by how quickly a disabled sherman could be get itself prepared and and back into action and the germans were baffled and dismayed to find that among his many other accomplishments henry ford had created a whole generation of mechanics but perhaps the model t's most profound impact what made it the single most significant automobile ever built was social in 1918 a georgia farm wife wrote henry ford your car lifted us out of the mud it brought joy into our lives the model t broke the age-old isolation of the farm in less than a decade and wherever it went it spun out behind it a new civilization of highways and roadside fixtures like motels and of course gas stations and a new way of thinking about space and time and in the 1930s john steinbeck looked back with a sort of sardonic awe on what had done in just half of his lifetime now of course the model t could never had such an effect had it not been deployed in enormous numbers and this even more than the car itself is the measure of ford's genius a number of car companies were turning out 100 cars a day during the model t's early years and that demonstrates very impressive capacities of manufacture but there is a fundamental difference between quantity production and mass production and it was by inventing the latter that ford invented the modern age the model t was a success ford could sell as many as he could make the way to make them he believed lay in precision and speed precision meant parts so scrupulously manufactured that one would all was fit where it belonged without any time consuming shaping or filing a speed lay in breaking down the manufacturing process into ever smaller segments this began in the spring of 1913 with the magneto which generated the electricity to fire the plugs it took a worker 20 minutes to assemble one one one worker put it together put another together ford separated the process into 29 steps and rather than one worker doing 29 things 29 workers would do one thing as the parts moved past their stations on what was the you know the first modern assembly line before it had taken 20 minutes now it took 13 minutes so with the engine then the transmission then the upholstery the axles and the radiators finally the whole car itself all was ford said bring the work to the man not the man to the work when ford first unveiled his model t it took 12 and a half hours to make one a little more than a decade later it took exactly a minute before the model t was done a car was coming off the line every 10 seconds ford made his millionth model t in 1915 his two millionth in 1917 and and so on for a while a million cars a year and then in the early 20s two million and he always lowered the price he he flew directly in the face of all all principles of monopoly capitalism which of course hold that if you have a desirable item that you alone own and other people want you raise the price not ford he said every time i shave a dollar off the price i gain a thousand new customers uh so the car had begun at 850 dollars and ended two decades later at 295 dollars in 1909 the company made a profit of 220.11 on each car with the moving assembly line up and running the profit fell to 99.34 and that was fine with ford and then in 1914 he announced that he was raising the base pay in his shop to five dollars a day this this was twice the going rate for industrial work and it caused a sensation he understood that it would be big news i don't think he would i don't think he'd quite prepared for the astonishing response it got people came in from all over the country and in fact he finally had to discourage them by saying he would only hire people who had lived in or around detroit for two years or more ford's workers became his customers no man who bolted together a packard gray wolf could ever own one every ford worker who wanted to could own a ford so ford also created a modern cycle of consumerism in which we still live during the great black diaspora after the first world war up north to detroit the uh african-americans knew there were there were two shops only two shops that were worth applying to packard might give you a job and ford probably would give you a job and he actually had uh blacks running gangs of uh of whites with the power to fire them which i think was uh not i can't think of another american industry in 1924 where that would have where that would have applied at all and in the end he had to give it up the last model t came off the line probably six or seven years later than it should have in 1927 ford had made 15 and a half million of them and when production ceased there were more than 11 million still on the road and of course there was tremendous interest in what ford would do to follow the model t in fact next to linberg's flight it was the biggest story of 1927 car sales dropped everywhere in a boom time as people waited to see what was coming it took the factory of course several months to retool and when the new car ford had started over fresh by calling it the model a was announced that december the new york world said the excitement could hardly have been greater had powah the sacred white elephant of berma elected to sit for seven days on the flag pole of the woolworth building it sold well 800 000 in its first year but chevrolet sold a million that same year and the ford motor company would never again be making one out of every two cars on the american road in any event that was henry ford how really to assess the true impact of this man it it may still be too early we're we're certainly still immersed in the modern world he created i think will rogers many years many years ago came pretty close um when he said to henry ford with none of his usual folksiness it may take a hundred years to tell whether you hurt us more than you helped us but you certainly didn't leave us where you found us and a terrific job on the storytelling editing and production by our own greg hengler and a special thanks to richard snowe what a storyteller and what a story to tell he's the author of i invented the modern age the rise of henry ford and there's so much to unpack here my goodness the stories about world war ii that we'd always heard that americans could just get under the hood of anything and fix it well this happened because of henry ford he turned america into a nation of auto mechanics and tinkerers i mean to this day that's why there are auto zones and my goodness the story of what he did bringing precision and speed to the manufacturing process the first modern assembly line and bringing the work to the man and of course bringing the speed with which he could produce one of his cars from 12 hours to the 12 hours to one minute 10 years later and millions and millions rolled off the assembly line all totaled 15 and a half million model t's and the thing i think most important contribution of henry ford's as it relates to capitalism and monopoly is that he did that thing no one expected someone with such market dominance to do which would generally be rip off the american public and raise prices ford always working to lower the price and at the same time he raised the wages of ordinary workers and factory workers doubling their wages and turning his workers into customers that will rogers line was the best of all it may take a hundred years to tell whether you helped us or hurt us but you sure didn't leave us where you found us the story of henry ford the story of modern age and the man who invented it here on our american stories hello i heart listener we have a confession to make both i heart in this commercial you're listening to right now would probably sound a heck of a lot better on the new roku pro series tv it's got side firing speakers that fill your room with sound dobi atmos audio that puts you right in the 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Whisper: medium.en / 2025-01-20 04:42:53 / 2025-01-20 04:59:30 / 17

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