History as Bunk

[rochvelleth]

100 Historical Things, Number 10

I have a load of work to do, but a small thing has been niggling at the back of my mind...

Does anyone have any idea what Henry Ford was talking about when he said the following?

History is more or less bunk.I know it as a famous quote, but have no idea of the context or what he was on about. I would be most

Comments

[pjc50]

http://www.science20.com/chatter_box/henry_ford_quote_history_bunk-79505 seems to be moderately informative from a bit of googling. I think the context is Ford's status as a maverick - his success was largely due to doing manufacturing in a completely different way to how it had been done. His view seems to have been that since tradition was wrong about manufacture, clearly historical ways of doing things were less efficient than the modern, scientific mind could produce.

Possibly the most bizarre fordism was his own colony: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia , but he's also credited being with what you might call the first "responsible capitalist": he moved the working week from six ten-hour days to five eight-hour days, and attempting to run the company in a job-maximising way:

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[ptc24]

When I was younger, Dad lent my Ford's My Philosophy of Industry which he picked up second-hand once - it was more than a little odd. I think towards the end, it started to go on about realizing the Kingdom of Heaven in your workplace, or something like that.

[denorios]

I think his idea was largely that history is what ties us into established ways of doing things, of behaving a certain way. And his argument was effectively 'we live in the present, so what does history matter?' Things were done a certain way back then, but that's no reason to shackle us into that way today. I suspect he was largely talking about industry and manufacture than history history.

Of course, part of me kind of agrees about the 'history is bunk' thing. In a way, it is. What comes to us as history is only ever part of the story, and there's no way that we can say with any degree of certainty that what we know as history is what actually happened. History's a story, in a way, and we only ever hear part of the tale.

[ptc24]

I wonder if there's a distinction here between the "things that happened in the past" sense of "history" and the "narrative based on things that happened in the past" sense of "history"; the difference between a meaningless series of events that signifies nothing, and a story with a moral, something you can learn the lessons of. Presumably if this distinction works, then Ford is asserting that the latter is bunk.

[roh_wyn]

I don't remember the exact context, but I believe Ford was making an argument that you can't be bound by the old way of doing things, just because of the weight of history. He was in favor of newer, faster production models which bucked existing manufacturing norms and threatened to turn that world on its head.

[gareth_rees]

The context was the debate over the USA’s entry into World War I. Ford was a pacifist, and gave many speeches and interviews to that effect. The famous phrase comes from an interview with Charles N. Wheeler published in the Chicago Tribune on 25 May 1916.

Wheeler pressed Ford on the necessity of military spending:“But you’re wrong there, Mr Ford,” I argued. “Take England, for instance. For a thousand years they have been unable to invade this littie strip of land you might tuck away in Michigan. Because England has a navy, Napoleon, with all of Europe at his feet, couldn’t get across the twenty-one miles from Calais to Dover. What you ought to stand for is an American Navy. With an adequate Navy we could live in peace and security for a million years.”
Ford replied “with a twinkle in his eye”:“Say, what do I care about Napoleon? What do we care what they did 500 or 1,000 years ago? I don’t know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across there and I don’t care. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition