It’s Still Henry Ford’s World
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Henry Ford was born 150 years ago, July 30, 1863. He is remembered now for building a great many automobiles, for saying that history was “bunk” and for a strenuous anti-Semitic campaign that did his Ford Motor Co. incalculable harm (and whose effects the company has successfully worked to ameliorate almost since the day he died, in 1947).
But there is much more to his legacy than that -- a legacy that takes on added resonance with the bankruptcy of Detroit, where it was largely forged. Late in Ford’s life, Will Rogers dropped his friendly folksiness to say, “It will take a hundred years to tell whether you have helped us or hurt us. But you certainly didn’t leave us where you found us.”