The Dearborn Independent was the circulating newspaper in my hometown 101 years ago. Henry Ford had a weekly column in it aptly entitled "Mr. Ford's Page". In light of "everything" that occurred this past year in our country and across the globe, I have to ask myself "When will we ever learn?" I am reprinting "Mr. Ford's" column from Saturday, February 21, 1920 in its entirety here....
"Mr. Ford's Page...
The ROOT problem, after all, is human nature. But to say that is to lay oneself open to the charge of platitude. There is an almost instinctive human dislike of any reminder that it is humanity, and not something outside of humanity, that is responsible for conditions. Even our wise men would rather talk learnedly about the effects of faulty human nature, as we view those effects in society, than about faulty human nature itself. However there is a very good object to be secured in compelling people to think deeply enough at times to penetrate as far as themselves, as far as their own secret natures, and as far as their individual responsibility for conditions.
We don't want to standardize human nature---we could not if we would. It is the endless variety of individuality that makes society endurable. But what all of us would like to do would be to standardize human moral dependability. We should like to be sure that to a certain essential degree we could absolutely depend on human nature "staying put". We are not sure of that now. We are not sure that we even shall be sure of it.
We can depend on the ability of certain elements which affect human nature. Man's need of food, sleep, clothing, and family life will influence him to a considerable degree; but even in spite of these he will still remain an unknown moral quantity.
When you form blocks of granite into the shape of a house, you are pretty sure that the granite is going to stay. But when you form men into an orderly society, you are not at all sure how long that form of society is going to stay. Unlike the material of the house, the material of society changes under your hands. There is no forecasting whether it will turn into adamant or sponge. It is now solid, now fluid, now hot, now cold, now orderly, now exulting in vast confusion.
Whatever may be the conditions in which we find ourselves present, this is absolutely true of them; they were caused by people: they are being continued by people: they will change when people change, and not before. We cannot control the weather, not every plague, but we can control---rather---we could control if we would---our social weather with its storms, uncertainty, its destructiveness, and its unequal seasons.
One of the strange phenomena of the present is the ascendancy of the destructive type of mind. The world at large seems to be infatuated with the idea that if something is pulled down, something is thereby built up. If something is destroyed, something is thereby created.
There is in every country a party which believes that if it could destroy the orderly institutions of that country, it would thereby create a new era of social justice. Every community has a group which believes that if only the channels of orderly justice and decency could be smashed, a new brotherhood of man would rise automatically out of the ruin. Would-be philosophers preach the doctrine of the necessity of revolution: never was any progress made, they say, except through violent revolutions. But everybody knows that every revolution was a mistake and disgraced or postponed the liberties it sought. The most revolutionary thing in the world is an idea, and a conquering idea does not need to imprison, punish, or kill a man to make itself powerful.
In the name of Order, disorder is counseled. In the name of Liberty, the dictatorship of a few idle and non-productive agitators is urged. In the name of Brotherhood, profound and venomous hatred between classes is fermented. Surely, human nature is the sum of all contradictions!
What every thoughtful man should fear about a possible revolution is not its occurrence, but the course it would take after it was started.
The difficulty about revolutions is the impossibility of controlling them....an impossibility shared even by the men who start revolutions. They get out of hand. They rage like forest fires. Very often they destroy even those who instigated them..."
Next post...the remainder of Henry Ford's column, reprinted here, from February 21, 1920