Ford, A Focus

AND THEN CAME FORD--Charles Merz --Doubleday Doran ($3). Author Merz of The Great American Band Wagon does not pretend to write a biography of Henry Ford. He illustrates instead the period of American development that is best illuminated by the highlights of Ford's career. The result is a logical piece of writing, efficient in its grasp of factual detail, but devoid of any great inspiration. Perhaps the subject matter is too familiar; perhaps the perspective too short. Unheralded by newspaper publicity, the first of the highlights were the successive experiments in mechanics that culminated in the historic Lizzy, Model T. For five years Model T was turned out of the Dearborn factory with increasingly unbelievable speed till it became "a landmark on the national scene as familiar as the eagle on its dollars and the cornfields on its plains." But in 1914 Ford caught the public, that is the journalistic imagination, by his announcement of a $5 minimum daily wage for labor that claimed only $1 or $1.50 elsewhere. From then on he provided periodic newspaper headlines. In quick succession came the campaign against the "Wise Men of Zion" and the voyage of the "Peace Ship"--two ventures which had little to do with the turn-outs of one million cars by 1915, five million by 1922. And with the ten millionth, Ford turned incongruously collector of antiques, patron of country dancing, defender of an earlier civilization. Mr. Merz considers it an irony that a civilization precocious in mechanics should be puerile in philosophy. His epitome of the later-day Ford: "The old scene vanished. And a man who had helped destroy it by contributing ten million cars to a mighty stream of motors went about the country with a basket picking up the pieces."