Henry Ford

A bright and chilly fall morning, 1879. Henry Ford and his teenaged pals have gathered early before another day of lessons at the Miller School in rural Springwells Township, northeast of Dearbornville, Michigan. Henry Ford, wiry and slight of build, is crouched down at the muddy slope of a ditch draining behind the schoolhouse, busily assembling a miniature waterwheel to run in the dammed stream. Just as the stream begins to rise - the wheel hooked up to an old coffee mill with a rake handle serving as a connecting rod - the bell rings, summoning the reluctant boys to abandon their work and enter the one-room cabin crammed with ten rows of wooden double-desks and stuffy from the heat of an old wood stove. That night, the waterwheel would jam and the ditch would overflow, flooding the neighboring farmer's potato patch.

And finally, Henry Ford and his classmates are asked to discuss, "How is Shylock punished? Was his punishment just? Why?"

Elsewhere in the Fifth Reader, the students read of "Paul's Defense before King Agrippa," in which the apostle laments the fact that despite his wide-ranging efforts to spread the gospel of repentance at Damascus, Jerusalem, and along the coasts of Judea, "the Jews caught me in the temple, and went about to kill me."

In his Fourth Reader, young Henry Ford had already been forewarned that "Jewish authors were incapable of the diction and strangers to the morality contained in the gospel." Rather, although the Jews had their "own sacred volume" known as the Old Testament, they misguidedly failed to heed within it "the most extraordinary predictions concerning the infidelity of their nation, Jesus' coming, and the rise, progress, and extensive prevalence of the gospel truth of Christianity." In his Third Reader, Henry had learned that the unfortunate Jews never accepted that "the Bible is a Christian book... the Scriptures are especially designed to make us wise unto salvation through faith in Christ Jesus."

Henry Ford had also read McGuffey's instructive tale of "The Good Son," in which a jeweler's child will not sell his diamonds to a group of Jewish elders because in order to obtain the key to the merchandise chest the lad would have to awaken his sleeping father. "At my father's age," the boy explains solemnly, "a short hour of sleep does him a great deal of good; and for all the gold in the world, I would not be wanting in respect to my father, or take from him a single comfort."

Throughout his life, Henry Ford expressed indebtedness to McGuffey's teachings. He was proud of his early exposure to this unadorned brand of book-learning, which reinforced an ordered, rigid, and straightforward view of a world where white was white and black was black. Known familiarly as "McGuffeyland," this was a pure and pastoral domain, where a boy worked with his own two hands and benefited directly from the products of hard labor, far removed from urban dens of cosmopolitan iniquity.

As an adult, Henry Ford could quote spontaneously line-for-line from McGuffey. He was an obsessive collector of McGuffey first editions and reprinted all six Readers from 1857, distributing complete sets of them, at his own considerable expense, to schools across the United States. In 1934, Henry Ford had McGuffey's whitewashed log cabin birthplace, complete with all its furnishings, disassembled from the Pennsylvania hill country and moved to Greenfield Village, Ford's exhaustive museum of Americana at Dearborn, Michigan. In 1936, Ford served as an associate editor - along with colleagues Hamlin Garland, John W. Studebaker, William F. Wiley, and several others - of a collection of Old Favorites from McGuffey Readers. The 482-page volume was dedicated to Ford, "lifelong devotee of his boyhood Alma Mater, the McGuffey Readers."