George Barr McCutcheon - "Her Weight in Gold"

T.S. Arthur - "Lessons in Life, For All Who Will Read Them"

Stephen Leacock - "The Hohenzollerns in America"

Pierre Loti - "Madame Chrysantheme, v4"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: My Life and Work

H >> Henry Ford >> My Life and Work




The Detroit, Toledo & Ironton Railway was organized some twenty-odd
years ago and has been reorganized every few years since then. The last
reorganization was in 1914. The war and the federal control of the
railways interrupted the cycle of reorganization. The road owns 343
miles of track, has 52 miles of branches, and 45 miles of trackage
rights over other roads. It goes from Detroit almost due south to
Ironton on the Ohio River, thus tapping the West Virginia coal deposits.
It crosses most of the large trunk lines and it is a road which, from a
general business standpoint, ought to pay. It has paid. It seems to have
paid the bankers. In 1913 the net capitalization per mile of road was
$105,000. In the next receivership this was cut down to $47,000 per
mile. I do not know how much money in all has been raised on the
strength of the road. I do know that in the reorganization of 1914 the
bondholders were assessed and forced to turn into the treasury nearly
five million dollars--which is the amount that we paid for the entire
road. We paid sixty cents on the dollar for the outstanding mortgage
bonds, although the ruling price just before the time of purchase was
between thirty and forty cents on the dollar. We paid a dollar a share
for the common stock and five dollars a share for the preferred
stock--which seemed to be a fair price considering that no interest had
ever been paid upon the bonds and a dividend on the stock was a most
remote possibility. The rolling stock of the road consisted of about
seventy locomotives, twenty-seven passenger cars, and around
twenty-eight hundred freight cars. All of the rolling stock was in
extremely bad condition and a good part of it would not run at all. All
of the buildings were dirty, unpainted, and generally run down. The
roadbed was something more than a streak of rust and something less than
a railway. The repair shops were over-manned and under-machined.
Practically everything connected with operation was conducted with a
maximum of waste. There was, however, an exceedingly ample executive and
administration department, and of course a legal department. The legal
department alone cost in one month nearly $18,000.

We took over the road in March, 1921. We began to apply industrial
principles. There had been an executive office in Detroit. We closed
that up and put the administration into the charge of one man and gave
him half of the flat-topped desk out in the freight office. The legal
department went with the executive offices. There is no reason for so
much litigation in connection with railroading. Our people quickly
settled all the mass of outstanding claims, some of which had been
hanging on for years. As new claims arise, they are settled at once and
on the facts, so that the legal expense seldom exceeds $200 a month. All
of the unnecessary accounting and red tape were thrown out and the
payroll of the road was reduced from 2,700 to 1,650 men. Following our
general policy, all titles and offices other than those required by law
were abolished. The ordinary railway organization is rigid; a message
has to go up through a certain line of authority and no man is expected
to do anything without explicit orders from his superior. One morning I
went out to the road very early and found a wrecking train with steam
up, a crew aboard and all ready to start. It had been "awaiting orders"
for half an hour. We went down and cleared the wreck before the orders
came through; that was before the idea of personal responsibility had
soaked in. It was a little hard to break the "orders" habit; the men at
first were afraid to take responsibility. But as we went on, they seemed
to like the plan more and more and now no man limits his duties. A man
is paid for a day's work of eight hours and he is expected to work
during those eight hours. If he is an engineer and finishes a run in
four hours then he works at whatever else may be in demand for the next
four hours. If a man works more than eight hours he is not paid for
overtime--he deducts his overtime from the next working day or saves it
up and gets a whole day off with pay. Our eight-hour day is a day of
eight hours and not a basis for computing pay.

The minimum wage is six dollars a day. There are no extra men. We have
cut down in the offices, in the shops, and on the roads. In one shop 20
men are now doing more work than 59 did before. Not long ago one of our
track gangs, consisting of a foreman and 15 men, was working beside a
parallel road on which was a gang of 40 men doing exactly the same sort
of track repairing and ballasting. In five days our gang did two
telegraph poles more than the competing gang!

The road is being rehabilitated; nearly the whole track has been
reballasted and many miles of new rails have been laid. The locomotives
and rolling stock are being overhauled in our own shops and at a very
slight expense. We found that the supplies bought previously were of
poor quality or unfitted for the use; we are saving money on supplies by
buying better qualities and seeing that nothing is wasted. The men seem
entirely willing to cooperate in saving. They do not discard that which
might be used. We ask a man, "What can you get out of an engine?" and he
answers with an economy record. And we are not pouring in great amounts
of money. Everything is being done out of earnings. That is our policy.
The trains must go through and on time. The time of freight movements
has been cut down about two thirds. A car on a siding is not just a car
on a siding. It is a great big question mark. Someone has to know why it
is there. It used to take 8 or 9 days to get freight through to
Philadelphia or New York; now it takes three and a half days. The
organization is serving.

All sorts of explanations are put forward, of why a deficit was turned
into a surplus. I am told that it is all due to diverting the freight of
the Ford industries. If we had diverted all of our business to this
road, that would not explain why we manage at so much lower an operating
cost than before. We are routing as much as we can of our own business
over the road, but only because we there get the best service. For years
past we had been trying to send freight over this road because it was
conveniently located, but we had never been able to use it to any extent
because of the delayed deliveries. We could not count on a shipment to
within five or six weeks; that tied up too much money and also broke
into our production schedule. There was no reason why the road should
not have had a schedule; but it did not. The delays became legal matters
to be taken up in due legal course; that is not the way of business. We
think that a delay is a criticism of our work and is something at once
to be investigated. That is business.

The railroads in general have broken down, and if the former conduct of
the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton is any criterion of management in general
there is no reason in the world why they should not have broken down.
Too many railroads are run, not from the offices of practical men, but
from banking offices, and the principles of procedure, the whole
outlook, are financial--not transportational, but financial. There has
been a breakdown simply because more attention has been paid to
railroads as factors in the stock market than as servants of the people.
Outworn ideas have been retained, development has been practically
stopped, and railroad men with vision have not been set free to grow.

Will a billion dollars solve that sort of trouble? No, a billion dollars
will only make the difficulty one billion dollars worse. The purpose of
the billion is simply to continue the present methods of railroad
management, and it is because of the present methods that we have any
railroad difficulties at all.

The mistaken and foolish things we did years ago are just overtaking us.
At the beginning of railway transportation in the United States, the
people had to be taught its use, just as they had to be taught the use
of the telephone. Also, the new railroads had to make business in order
to keep themselves solvent. And because railway financing began in one
of the rottenest periods of our business history, a number of practices
were established as precedents which have influenced railway work ever
since. One of the first things the railways did was to throttle all
other methods of transportation. There was the beginning of a splendid
canal system in this country and a great movement for canalization was
at its height. The railroad companies bought out the canal companies and
let the canals fill up and choke with weeds and refuse. All over the
Eastern and in parts of the Middle Western states are the remains of
this network of internal waterways. They are being restored now as
rapidly as possible; they are being linked together; various
commissions, public and private, have seen the vision of a complete
system of waterways serving all parts of the country, and thanks to
their efforts, persistence, and faith, progress is being made.

But there was another. This was the system of making the haul as long as
possible. Any one who is familiar with the exposures which resulted in
the formation of the Interstate Commerce Commission knows what is meant
by this. There was a period when rail transport was not regarded as the
servant of the traveling, manufacturing, and commercial publics.
Business was treated as if it existed for the benefit of the railways.
During this period of folly, it was not good railroading to get goods
from their shipping point to their destination by the most direct line
possible, but to keep them on the road as long as possible, send them
around the longest way, give as many connecting lines as possible a
piece of the profit, and let the public stand the resulting loss of time
and money. That was once counted good railroading. It has not entirely
passed out of practice to-day.

One of the great changes in our economic life to which this railroad
policy contributed was the centralization of certain activities, not
because centralization was necessary, nor because it contributed to the
well-being of the people, but because, among other things, it made
double business for the railroads. Take two staples--meat and grain. If
you look at the maps which the packing houses put out, and see where the
cattle are drawn from; and then if you consider that the cattle, when
converted into food, are hauled again by the same railways right back to
the place where they came from, you will get some sidelight on the
transportation problem and the price of meat. Take also grain. Every
reader of advertisements knows where the great flour mills of the
country are located. And they probably know also that these great mills
are not located in the sections where the grain of the United States is
raised. There are staggering quantities of grain, thousands of
trainloads, hauled uselessly long distances, and then in the form of
flour hauled back again long distances to the states and sections where
the grain was raised--a burdening of the railroads which is of no
benefit to the communities where the grain originated, nor to any one
else except the monopolistic mills and the railroads. The railroads can
always do a big business without helping the business of the country at
all; they can always be engaged in just such useless hauling. On meat
and grain and perhaps on cotton, too, the transportation burden could be
reduced by more than half, by the preparation of the product for use
before it is shipped. If a coal community mined coal in Pennsylvania,
and then sent it by railway to Michigan or Wisconsin to be screened, and
then hauled it back again to Pennsylvania for use, it would not be much
sillier than the hauling of Texas beef alive to Chicago, there to be
killed, and then shipped back dead to Texas; or the hauling of Kansas
grain to Minnesota, there to be ground in the mills and hauled back
again as flour. It is good business for the railroads, but it is bad
business for business. One angle of the transportation problem to which
too few men are paying attention is this useless hauling of material. If
the problem were tackled from the point of ridding the railroads of
their useless hauls, we might discover that we are in better shape than
we think to take care of the legitimate transportation business of the
country. In commodities like coal it is necessary that they be hauled
from where they are to where they are needed. The same is true of the
raw materials of industry--they must be hauled from the place where
nature has stored them to the place where there are people ready to work
them. And as these raw materials are not often found assembled in one
section, a considerable amount of transportation to a central assembling
place is necessary. The coal comes from one section, the copper from
another, the iron from another, the wood from another--they must all be
brought together.

But wherever it is possible a policy of decentralization ought to be
adopted. We need, instead of mammoth flour mills, a multitude of smaller
mills distributed through all the sections where grain is grown.
Wherever it is possible, the section that produces the raw material
ought to produce also the finished product. Grain should be ground to
flour where it is grown. A hog-growing country should not export hogs,
but pork, hams, and bacon. The cotton mills ought to be near the cotton
fields. This is not a revolutionary idea. In a sense it is a reactionary
one. It does not suggest anything new; it suggests something that is
very old. This is the way the country did things before we fell into the
habit of carting everything around a few thousand miles and adding the
cartage to the consumer's bill. Our communities ought to be more
complete in themselves. They ought not to be unnecessarily dependent on
railway transportation. Out of what they produce they should supply
their own needs and ship the surplus. And how can they do this unless
they have the means of taking their raw materials, like grain and
cattle, and changing them into finished products? If private enterprise
does not yield these means, the cooperation of farmers can. The chief
injustice sustained by the farmer to-day is that, being the greatest
producer, he is prevented from being also the greatest merchandiser,
because he is compelled to sell to those who put his products into
merchantable form. If he could change his grain into flour, his cattle
into beef, and his hogs into hams and bacon, not only would he receive
the fuller profit of his product, but he would render his near-by
communities more independent of railway exigencies, and thereby improve
the transportation system by relieving it of the burden of his
unfinished product. The thing is not only reasonable and practicable,
but it is becoming absolutely necessary. More than that, it is being
done in many places. But it will not register its full effect on the
transportation situation and upon the cost of living until it is done
more widely and in more kinds of materials.

It is one of nature's compensations to withdraw prosperity from the
business which does not serve.

We have found that on the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton we could, following
our universal policy, reduce our rates and get more business. We made
some cuts, but the Interstate Commerce Commission refused to allow them!
Under such conditions why discuss the railroads as a business? Or as a
service?




CHAPTER XVII

THINGS IN GENERAL


No man exceeds Thomas A. Edison in broad vision and understanding. I met
him first many years ago when I was with the Detroit Edison
Company--probably about 1887 or thereabouts. The electrical men held a
convention at Atlantic City, and Edison, as the leader in electrical
science, made an address. I was then working on my gasoline engine, and
most people, including all of my associates in the electrical company,
had taken pains to tell me that time spent on a gasoline engine was time
wasted--that the power of the future was to be electricity. These
criticisms had not made any impression on me. I was working ahead with
all my might. But being in the same room with Edison suggested to me
that it would be a good idea to find out if the master of electricity
thought it was going to be the only power in the future. So, after Mr.
Edison had finished his address, I managed to catch him alone for a
moment. I told him what I was working on.

At once he was interested. He is interested in every search for new
knowledge. And then I asked him if he thought that there was a future
for the internal combustion engine. He answered something in this
fashion:

Yes, there is a big future for any light-weight engine that can develop
a high horsepower and be self-contained. No one kind of motive power is
ever going to do all the work of the country. We do not know what
electricity can do, but I take for granted that it cannot do everything.

Keep on with your engine. If you can get what you are after, I can see a
great future.

That is characteristic of Edison. He was the central figure in the
electrical industry, which was then young and enthusiastic. The rank and
file of the electrical men could see nothing ahead but electricity, but
their leader could see with crystal clearness that no one power could do
all the work of the country. I suppose that is why he was the leader.

Such was my first meeting with Edison. I did not see him again until
many years after--until our motor had been developed and was in
production. He remembered perfectly our first meeting. Since then we
have seen each other often. He is one of my closest friends, and we
together have swapped many an idea.

His knowledge is almost universal. He is interested in every conceivable
subject and he recognizes no limitations. He believes that all things
are possible. At the same time he keeps his feet on the ground. He goes
forward step by step. He regards "impossible" as a description for that
which we have not at the moment the knowledge to achieve. He knows that
as we amass knowledge we build the power to overcome the impossible.
That is the rational way of doing the "impossible." The irrational way
is to make the attempt without the toil of accumulating knowledge. Mr.
Edison is only approaching the height of his power. He is the man who is
going to show us what chemistry really can do. For he is a real
scientist who regards the knowledge for which he is always searching as
a tool to shape the progress of the world. He is not the type of
scientist who merely stores up knowledge and turns his head into a
museum. Edison is easily the world's greatest scientist. I am not sure
that he is not also the world's worst business man. He knows almost
nothing of business.

John Burroughs was another of those who honoured me with their
friendship. I, too, like birds. I like the outdoors. I like to walk
across country and jump fences. We have five hundred bird houses on the
farm. We call them our bird hotels, and one of them, the Hotel
Pontchartrain--a martin house--has seventy-six apartments. All winter
long we have wire baskets of food hanging about on the trees and then
there is a big basin in which the water is kept from freezing by an
electric heater. Summer and winter, food, drink, and shelter are on hand
for the birds. We have hatched pheasants and quail in incubators and
then turned them over to electric brooders. We have all kinds of bird
houses and nests. The sparrows, who are great abusers of hospitality,
insist that their nests be immovable--that they do not sway in the wind;
the wrens like swaying nests. So we mounted a number of wren boxes on
strips of spring steel so that they would sway in the wind. The wrens
liked the idea and the sparrows did not, so we have been able to have
the wrens nest in peace. In summer we leave cherries on the trees and
strawberries open in the beds, and I think that we have not only more
but also more different kinds of bird callers than anywhere else in the
northern states. John Burroughs said he thought we had, and one day when
he was staying at our place he came across a bird that he had never seen
before.

About ten years ago we imported a great number of birds from
abroad--yellow-hammers, chaffinches, green finches, red pales, twites,
bullfinches, jays, linnets, larks--some five hundred of them. They
stayed around a while, but where they are now I do not know. I shall not
import any more. Birds are entitled to live where they want to live.

Birds are the best of companions. We need them for their beauty and
their companionship, and also we need them for the strictly economic
reason that they destroy harmful insects. The only time I ever used the
Ford organization to influence legislation was on behalf of the birds,
and I think the end justified the means. The Weeks-McLean Bird Bill,
providing for bird sanctuaries for our migratory birds, had been hanging
in Congress with every likelihood of dying a natural death. Its
immediate sponsors could not arouse much interest among the Congressmen.
Birds do not vote. We got behind that bill and we asked each of our six
thousand dealers to wire to his representative in Congress. It began to
become apparent that birds might have votes; the bill went through. Our
organization has never been used for any political purpose and never
will be. We assume that our people have a right to their own
preferences.

To get back to John Burroughs. Of course I knew who he was and I had
read nearly everything he had written, but I had never thought of
meeting him until some years ago when he developed a grudge against
modern progress. He detested money and especially he detested the power
which money gives to vulgar people to despoil the lovely countryside. He
grew to dislike the industry out of which money is made. He disliked the
noise of factories and railways. He criticized industrial progress, and
he declared that the automobile was going to kill the appreciation of
nature. I fundamentally disagreed with him. I thought that his emotions
had taken him on the wrong tack and so I sent him an automobile with the
request that he try it out and discover for himself whether it would not
help him to know nature better. That automobile--and it took him some
time to learn how to manage it himself--completely changed his point of
view. He found that it helped him to see more, and from the time of
getting it, he made nearly all of his bird-hunting expeditions behind
the steering wheel. He learned that instead of having to confine himself
to a few miles around Slabsides, the whole countryside was open to him.

Out of that automobile grew our friendship, and it was a fine one. No
man could help being the better for knowing John Burroughs. He was not a
professional naturalist, nor did he make sentiment do for hard research.
It is easy to grow sentimental out of doors; it is hard to pursue the
truth about a bird as one would pursue a mechanical principle. But John
Burroughs did that, and as a result the observations he set down were
very largely accurate. He was impatient with men who were not accurate
in their observations of natural life. John Burroughs first loved nature
for its own sake; it was not merely his stock of material as a
professional writer. He loved it before he wrote about it.

Late in life he turned philosopher. His philosophy was not so much a
philosophy of nature as it was a natural philosophy--the long, serene
thoughts of a man who had lived in the tranquil spirit of the trees. He
was not pagan; he was not pantheist; but he did not much divide between
nature and human nature, nor between human nature and divine. John
Burroughs lived a wholesome life. He was fortunate to have as his home
the farm on which he was born. Through long years his surroundings were
those which made for quietness of mind. He loved the woods and he made
dusty-minded city people love them, too--he helped them see what he saw.
He did not make much beyond a living. He could have done so, perhaps,
but that was not his aim. Like another American naturalist, his
occupation could have been described as inspector of birds' nests and
hillside paths. Of course, that does not pay in dollars and cents.

When he had passed the three score and ten he changed his views on
industry. Perhaps I had something to do with that. He came to see that
the whole world could not live by hunting birds' nests. At one time in
his life, he had a grudge against all modern progress, especially where
it was associated with the burning of coal and the noise of traffic.
Perhaps that was as near to literary affectation as he ever came.
Wordsworth disliked railways too, and Thoreau said that he could see
more of the country by walking. Perhaps it was influences such as these
which bent John Burroughs for a time against industrial progress. But
only for a time. He came to see that it was fortunate for him that
others' tastes ran in other channels, just as it was fortunate for the
world that his taste ran in its own channel. There has been no
observable development in the method of making birds' nests since the
beginning of recorded observation, but that was hardly a reason why
human beings should not prefer modern sanitary homes to cave dwellings.
This was a part of John Burroughs's sanity--he was not afraid to change
his views. He was a lover of Nature, not her dupe. In the course of time
he came to value and approve modern devices, and though this by itself
is an interesting fact, it is not so interesting as the fact that he
made this change after he was seventy years old. John Burroughs was
never too old to change. He kept growing to the last. The man who is too
set to change is dead already. The funeral is a mere detail.