Lloyd Osbourne - "Love, The Fiddler"

Caroline Clifford Newton - "Once Upon A Time In Connecticut"

Peter B. Kyne - "The Long Chance"

Philip Gibbs - "Now It Can Be Told"

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




If he talked more of one person than another, it was Emerson. Not only
did he know Emerson by heart as an author, but he knew him by heart as a
spirit. He taught me to know Emerson. He had so saturated himself with
Emerson that at one time he thought as he did and even fell into his
mode of expression. But afterward he found his own way--which for him
was better.

There was no sadness in John Burroughs's death. When the grain lies
brown and ripe under the harvest sun, and the harvesters are busy
binding it into sheaves, there is no sadness for the grain. It has
ripened and has fulfilled its term, and so had John Burroughs. With him
it was full ripeness and harvest, not decay. He worked almost to the
end. His plans ran beyond the end. They buried him amid the scenes he
loved, and it was his eighty-fourth birthday. Those scenes will be
preserved as he loved them.

John Burroughs, Edison, and I with Harvey S. Firestone made several
vagabond trips together. We went in motor caravans and slept under
canvas. Once we gypsied through the Adirondacks and again through the
Alleghenies, heading southward. The trips were good fun--except that
they began to attract too much attention.

* * * * *

To-day I am more opposed to war than ever I was, and I think the people
of the world know--even if the politicians do not--that war never
settles anything. It was war that made the orderly and profitable
processes of the world what they are to-day--a loose, disjointed mass.
Of course, some men get rich out of war; others get poor. But the men
who get rich are not those who fought or who really helped behind the
lines. No patriot makes money out of war. No man with true patriotism
could make money out of war--out of the sacrifice of other men's lives.
Until the soldier makes money by fighting, until mothers make money by
giving their sons to death--not until then should any citizen make money
out of providing his country with the means to preserve its life.

If wars are to continue, it will be harder and harder for the upright
business man to regard war as a legitimate means of high and speedy
profits. War fortunes are losing caste every day. Even greed will some
day hesitate before the overwhelming unpopularity and opposition which
will meet the war profiteer. Business should be on the side of peace,
because peace is business's best asset.

And, by the way, was inventive genius ever so sterile as it was during
the war?

An impartial investigation of the last war, of what preceded it and what
has come out of it, would show beyond a doubt that there is in the world
a group of men with vast powers of control, that prefers to remain
unknown, that does not seek office or any of the tokens of power, that
belongs to no nation whatever but is international--a force that uses
every government, every widespread business organization, every agency
of publicity, every resource of national psychology, to throw the world
into a panic for the sake of getting still more power over the world. An
old gambling trick used to be for the gambler to cry "Police!" when a
lot of money was on the table, and, in the panic that followed, to seize
the money and run off with it. There is a power within the world which
cries "War!" and in the confusion of the nations, the unrestrained
sacrifice which people make for safety and peace runs off with the
spoils of the panic.

The point to keep in mind is that, though we won the military contest,
the world has not yet quite succeeded in winning a complete victory over
the promoters of war. We ought not to forget that wars are a purely
manufactured evil and are made according to a definite technique. A
campaign for war is made upon as definite lines as a campaign for any
other purpose. First, the people are worked upon. By clever tales the
people's suspicions are aroused toward the nation against whom war is
desired. Make the nation suspicious; make the other nation suspicious.
All you need for this is a few agents with some cleverness and no
conscience and a press whose interest is locked up with the interests
that will be benefited by war. Then the "overt act" will soon appear. It
is no trick at all to get an "overt act" once you work the hatred of two
nations up to the proper pitch.

There were men in every country who were glad to see the World War begin
and sorry to see it stop. Hundreds of American fortunes date from the
Civil War; thousands of new fortunes date from the World War. Nobody can
deny that war is a profitable business for those who like that kind of
money. War is an orgy of money, just as it is an orgy of blood.

And we should not so easily be led into war if we considered what it is
that makes a nation really great. It is not the amount of trade that
makes a nation great. The creation of private fortunes, like the
creation of an autocracy, does not make any country great. Nor does the
mere change of an agricultural population into a factory population. A
country becomes great when, by the wise development of its resources and
the skill of its people, property is widely and fairly distributed.

Foreign trade is full of delusions. We ought to wish for every nation as
large a degree of self-support as possible. Instead of wishing to keep
them dependent on us for what we manufacture, we should wish them to
learn to manufacture themselves and build up a solidly founded
civilization. When every nation learns to produce the things which it
can produce, we shall be able to get down to a basis of serving each
other along those special lines in which there can be no competition.
The North Temperate Zone will never be able to compete with the tropics
in the special products of the tropics. Our country will never be a
competitor with the Orient in the production of tea, nor with the South
in the production of rubber.

A large proportion of our foreign trade is based on the backwardness of
our foreign customers. Selfishness is a motive that would preserve that
backwardness. Humanity is a motive that would help the backward nations
to a self-supporting basis. Take Mexico, for example. We have heard a
great deal about the "development" of Mexico. Exploitation is the word
that ought instead to be used. When its rich natural resources are
exploited for the increase of the private fortunes of foreign
capitalists, that is not development, it is ravishment. You can never
develop Mexico until you develop the Mexican. And yet how much of the
"development" of Mexico by foreign exploiters ever took account of the
development of its people? The Mexican peon has been regarded as mere
fuel for the foreign money-makers. Foreign trade has been his
degradation.

Short-sighted people are afraid of such counsel. They say: "What would
become of our foreign trade?"

When the natives of Africa begin raising their own cotton and the
natives of Russia begin making their own farming implements and the
natives of China begin supplying their own wants, it will make a
difference, to be sure, but does any thoughtful man imagine that the
world can long continue on the present basis of a few nations supplying
the needs of the world? We must think in terms of what the world will be
when civilization becomes general, when all the peoples have learned to
help themselves.

When a country goes mad about foreign trade it usually depends on other
countries for its raw material, turns its population into factory
fodder, creates a private rich class, and lets its own immediate
interest lie neglected. Here in the United States we have enough work to
do developing our own country to relieve us of the necessity of looking
for foreign trade for a long time. We have agriculture enough to feed us
while we are doing it, and money enough to carry the job through. Is
there anything more stupid than the United States standing idle because
Japan or France or any other country has not sent us an order when there
is a hundred-year job awaiting us in developing our own country?

Commerce began in service. Men carried off their surplus to people who
had none. The country that raised corn carried it to the country that
could raise no corn. The lumber country brought wood to the treeless
plain. The vine country brought fruit to cold northern climes. The
pasture country brought meat to the grassless region. It was all
service. When all the peoples of the world become developed in the art
of self-support, commerce will get back to that basis. Business will
once more become service. There will be no competition, because the
basis of competition will have vanished. The varied peoples will develop
skills which will be in the nature of monopolies and not competitive.
From the beginning, the races have exhibited distinct strains of genius:
this one for government; another for colonization; another for the sea;
another for art and music; another for agriculture; another for
business, and so on. Lincoln said that this nation could not survive
half-slave and half-free. The human race cannot forever exist
half-exploiter and half-exploited. Until we become buyers and sellers
alike, producers and consumers alike, keeping the balance not for profit
but for service, we are going to have topsy-turvy conditions.

France has something to give the world of which no competition can cheat
her. So has Italy. So has Russia. So have the countries of South
America. So has Japan. So has Britain. So has the United States. The
sooner we get back to a basis of natural specialties and drop this
free-for-all system of grab, the sooner we shall be sure of
international self-respect--and international peace. Trying to take the
trade of the world can promote war. It cannot promote prosperity. Some
day even the international bankers will learn this.

I have never been able to discover any honourable reasons for the
beginning of the World War. It seems to have grown out of a very
complicated situation created largely by those who thought they could
profit by war. I believed, on the information that was given to me in
1916, that some of the nations were anxious for peace and would welcome
a demonstration for peace. It was in the hope that this was true that I
financed the expedition to Stockholm in what has since been called the
"Peace Ship." I do not regret the attempt. The mere fact that it failed
is not, to me, conclusive proof that it was not worth trying. We learn
more from our failures than from our successes. What I learned on that
trip was worth the time and the money expended. I do not now know
whether the information as conveyed to me was true or false. I do not
care. But I think everyone will agree that if it had been possible to
end the war in 1916 the world would be better off than it is to-day.

For the victors wasted themselves in winning, and the vanquished in
resisting. Nobody got an advantage, honourable or dishonourable, out of
that war. I had hoped, finally, when the United States entered the war,
that it might be a war to end wars, but now I know that wars do not end
wars any more than an extraordinarily large conflagration does away with
the fire hazard. When our country entered the war, it became the duty of
every citizen to do his utmost toward seeing through to the end that
which we had undertaken. I believe that it is the duty of the man who
opposes war to oppose going to war up until the time of its actual
declaration. My opposition to war is not based upon pacifist or
non-resistant principles. It may be that the present state of
civilization is such that certain international questions cannot be
discussed; it may be that they have to be fought out. But the fighting
never settles the question. It only gets the participants around to a
frame of mind where they will agree to discuss what they were fighting
about.

Once we were in the war, every facility of the Ford industries was put
at the disposal of the Government. We had, up to the time of the
declaration of war, absolutely refused to take war orders from the
foreign belligerents. It is entirely out of keeping with the principles
of our business to disturb the routine of our production unless in an
emergency. It is at variance with our human principles to aid either
side in a war in which our country was not involved. These principles
had no application, once the United States entered the war. From April,
1917, until November, 1918, our factory worked practically exclusively
for the Government. Of course we made cars and parts and special
delivery trucks and ambulances as a part of our general production, but
we also made many other articles that were more or less new to us. We
made 2 1/2-ton and 6-ton trucks. We made Liberty motors in great
quantities, aero cylinders, 1.55 Mm. and 4.7 Mm. caissons. We made
listening devices, steel helmets (both at Highland Park and
Philadelphia), and Eagle Boats, and we did a large amount of
experimental work on armour plate, compensators, and body armour. For
the Eagle Boats we put up a special plant on the River Rouge site. These
boats were designed to combat the submarines. They were 204 feet long,
made of steel, and one of the conditions precedent to their building was
that their construction should not interfere with any other line of war
production and also that they be delivered quickly. The design was
worked out by the Navy Department. On December 22, 1917, I offered to
build the boats for the Navy. The discussion terminated on January 15,
1918, when the Navy Department awarded the contract to the Ford Company.
On July 11th, the first completed boat was launched. We made both the
hulls and the engines, and not a forging or a rolled beam entered into
the construction of other than the engine. We stamped the hulls entirely
out of sheet steel. They were built indoors. In four months we ran up a
building at the River Rouge a third of a mile long, 350 feet wide, and
100 feet high, covering more than thirteen acres. These boats were not
built by marine engineers. They were built simply by applying our
production principles to a new product.

With the Armistice, we at once dropped the war and went back to peace.

* * * * *

An able man is a man who can do things, and his ability to do things is
dependent on what he has in him. What he has in him depends on what he
started with and what he has done to increase and discipline it.

An educated man is not one whose memory is trained to carry a few dates
in history--he is one who can accomplish things. A man who cannot think
is not an educated man however many college degrees he may have
acquired. Thinking is the hardest work any one can do--which is
probably the reason why we have so few thinkers. There are two extremes
to be avoided: one is the attitude of contempt toward education, the
other is the tragic snobbery of assuming that marching through an
educational system is a sure cure for ignorance and mediocrity. You
cannot learn in any school what the world is going to do next year, but
you can learn some of the things which the world has tried to do in
former years, and where it failed and where it succeeded. If education
consisted in warning the young student away from some of the false
theories on which men have tried to build, so that he may be saved the
loss of the time in finding out by bitter experience, its good would be
unquestioned. An education which consists of signposts indicating the
failure and the fallacies of the past doubtless would be very useful. It
is not education just to possess the theories of a lot of professors.
Speculation is very interesting, and sometimes profitable, but it is not
education. To be learned in science to-day is merely to be aware of a
hundred theories that have not been proved. And not to know what those
theories are is to be "uneducated," "ignorant," and so forth. If
knowledge of guesses is learning, then one may become learned by the
simple expedient of making his own guesses. And by the same token he can
dub the rest of the world "ignorant" because it does not know what his
guesses are. But the best that education can do for a man is to put him
in possession of his powers, give him control of the tools with which
destiny has endowed him, and teach him how to think. The college renders
its best service as an intellectual gymnasium, in which mental muscle is
developed and the student strengthened to do what he can. To say,
however, that mental gymnastics can be had only in college is not true,
as every educator knows. A man's real education begins after he has left
school. True education is gained through the discipline of life.

There are many kinds of knowledge, and it depends on what crowd you
happen to be in, or how the fashions of the day happen to run, which
kind of knowledge, is most respected at the moment. There are fashions
in knowledge, just as there are in everything else. When some of us were
lads, knowledge used to be limited to the Bible. There were certain men
in the neighbourhood who knew the Book thoroughly, and they were looked
up to and respected. Biblical knowledge was highly valued then. But
nowadays it is doubtful whether deep acquaintance with the Bible would
be sufficient to win a man a name for learning.

Knowledge, to my mind, is something that in the past somebody knew and
left in a form which enables all who will to obtain it. If a man is born
with normal human faculties, if he is equipped with enough ability to
use the tools which we call "letters" in reading or writing, there is no
knowledge within the possession of the race that he cannot have--if he
wants it! The only reason why every man does not know everything that
the human mind has ever learned is that no one has ever yet found it
worth while to know that much. Men satisfy their minds more by finding
out things for themselves than by heaping together the things which
somebody else has found out. You can go out and gather knowledge all
your life, and with all your gathering you will not catch up even with
your own times. You may fill your head with all the "facts" of all the
ages, and your head may be just an overloaded fact-box when you get
through. The point is this: Great piles of knowledge in the head are not
the same as mental activity. A man may be very learned and very useless.
And then again, a man may be unlearned and very useful.

The object of education is not to fill a man's mind with facts; it is to
teach him how to use his mind in thinking. And it often happens that a
man can think better if he is not hampered by the knowledge of the past.

It is a very human tendency to think that what mankind does not yet know
no one can learn. And yet it must be perfectly clear to everyone that
the past learning of mankind cannot be allowed to hinder our future
learning. Mankind has not gone so very far when you measure its progress
against the knowledge that is yet to be gained--the secrets that are yet
to be learned.

One good way to hinder progress is to fill a man's head with all the
learning of the past; it makes him feel that because his head is full,
there is nothing more to learn. Merely gathering knowledge may become
the most useless work a man can do. What can you do to help and heal the
world? That is the educational test. If a man can hold up his own end,
he counts for one. If he can help ten or a hundred or a thousand other
men hold up their ends, he counts for more. He may be quite rusty on
many things that inhabit the realm of print, but he is a learned man
just the same. When a man is master of his own sphere, whatever it may
be, he has won his degree--he has entered the realm of wisdom.

* * * * *

The work which we describe as Studies in the Jewish Question, and which
is variously described by antagonists as "the Jewish campaign," "the
attack on the Jews," "the anti-Semitic pogrom," and so forth, needs no
explanation to those who have followed it. Its motives and purposes must
be judged by the work itself. It is offered as a contribution to a
question which deeply affects the country, a question which is racial at
its source, and which concerns influences and ideals rather than
persons. Our statements must be judged by candid readers who are
intelligent enough to lay our words alongside life as they are able to
observe it. If our word and their observation agree, the case is made.
It is perfectly silly to begin to damn us before it has been shown that
our statements are baseless or reckless. The first item to be considered
is the truth of what we have set forth. And that is precisely the item
which our critics choose to evade.

Readers of our articles will see at once that we are not actuated by any
kind of prejudice, except it may be a prejudice in favor of the
principles which have made our civilization. There had been observed in
this country certain streams of influence which were causing a marked
deterioration in our literature, amusements, and social conduct;
business was departing from its old-time substantial soundness; a
general letting down of standards was felt everywhere. It was not the
robust coarseness of the white man, the rude indelicacy, say, of
Shakespeare's characters, but a nasty Orientalism which has insidiously
affected every channel of expression--and to such an extent that it was
time to challenge it. The fact that these influences are all traceable
to one racial source is a fact to be reckoned with, not by us only, but
by the intelligent people of the race in question. It is entirely
creditable to them that steps have been taken by them to remove their
protection from the more flagrant violators of American hospitality, but
there is still room to discard outworn ideas of racial superiority
maintained by economic or intellectually subversive warfare upon
Christian society.

Our work does not pretend to say the last word on the Jew in America. It
says only the word which describes his obvious present impress on the
country. When that impress is changed, the report of it can be changed.
For the present, then, the question is wholly in the Jews' hands. If
they are as wise as they claim to be, they will labour to make Jews
American, instead of labouring to make America Jewish. The genius of the
United States of America is Christian in the broadest sense, and its
destiny is to remain Christian. This carries no sectarian meaning with
it, but relates to a basic principle which differs from other principles
in that it provides for liberty with morality, and pledges society to a
code of relations based on fundamental Christian conceptions of human
rights and duties.

As for prejudice or hatred against persons, that is neither American nor
Christian. Our opposition is only to ideas, false ideas, which are
sapping the moral stamina of the people. These ideas proceed from easily
identified sources, they are promulgated by easily discoverable methods;
and they are controlled by mere exposure. We have simply used the method
of exposure. When people learn to identify the source and nature of the
influence swirling around them, it is sufficient. Let the American
people once understand that it is not natural degeneracy, but calculated
subversion that afflicts us, and they are safe. The explanation is the
cure.

This work was taken up without personal motives. When it reached a stage
where we believed the American people could grasp the key, we let it
rest for the time. Our enemies say that we began it for revenge and that
we laid it down in fear. Time will show that our critics are merely
dealing in evasion because they dare not tackle the main question. Time
will also show that we are better friends to the Jews' best interests
than are those who praise them to their faces and criticize them behind
their backs.




CHAPTER XVIII

DEMOCRACY AND INDUSTRY


Perhaps no word is more overworked nowadays than the word "democracy,"
and those who shout loudest about it, I think, as a rule, want it least.
I am always suspicious of men who speak glibly of democracy. I wonder if
they want to set up some kind of a despotism or if they want to have
somebody do for them what they ought to do for themselves. I am for the
kind of democracy that gives to each an equal chance according to his
ability. I think if we give more attention to serving our fellows we
shall have less concern with the empty forms of government and more
concern with the things to be done. Thinking of service, we shall not
bother about good feeling in industry or life; we shall not bother about
masses and classes, or closed and open shops, and such matters as have
nothing at all to do with the real business of living. We can get down
to facts. We stand in need of facts.

It is a shock when the mind awakens to the fact that not all of humanity
is human--that whole groups of people do not regard others with humane
feelings. Great efforts have been made to have this appear as the
attitude of a class, but it is really the attitude of all "classes," in
so far as they are swayed by the false notion of "classes." Before, when
it was the constant effort of propaganda to make the people believe that
it was only the "rich" who were without humane feelings, the opinion
became general that among the "poor" the humane virtues flourished.