ABSTRACT
Henry Ford's hold on America's imagination, indeed, on the imagination of the world's masses, was not due to his fabulous financial success. For Henry Ford was less the symbol and embodiment of new wealth and of the automobile age than the symbol and embodiment of our new industrial mass-production civilization. The populists had believed that a Jeffersonian millennium would result automatically from eliminating 'monopoly' and the 'money power' and the 'satanic mills' of crude industrialism, as these terms were understood in the nineteenth century. The world of Ford's death, the world after World War II, was at least as much under the spell of Frankin D. Roosevelt's name as an earlier generation had been under that of Wilson. Henry Ford took the conveyor belt and the assembly line from the meat-packing industry, where they had been in general use as early as 1880. It was Ford's personal tragedy to live long enough to see his Utopia crumble.
