The Arterburn Radio Transmission Podcast
The Arterburn Radio Transmission is a blend of cutting edge commentary, fused with guests who are the newsmakers and trailblazers of our time. Your host Tony Arterburn is a former Army paratrooper, entrepreneur, and historian. Tony brings his unique perspective to the issues facing our country, civilization, and planet.
The Arterburn Radio Transmission Podcast
#33 Paratruther - Henry Ford's Revolutionary Impact, Entrepreneurial Legacy, & Modern Political Challenges
Thank you. Well it's.
Speaker 2:Sunday. That means it's Paratrooper Live. Welcome back to another episode. Ladies and gents, we have the full A-Team back together. Chris has Made the transition from the Stranger Things dimension back to Our reality. We're really glad he's here. Mr Anderson is probably somewhere between here and wherever the A, wherever the AI has him placed in the height of civilization, somewhere in 1999 in the movie the Matrix.
Speaker 3:Why don't you worry about yourself when you are?
Speaker 2:I'm just trying to give the audience a full view of where you may be.
Speaker 2:Sir, nobody knows who you are, or where you are, or who you are or sir, nobody knows who you are or where you are, or who you are or why, or why are you, why are you? This is going to be a fun show. We've decided we've had a list on the group text that we were going to do some more hidden history, history's mysteries, if you will, some of the esoteric, deep dives stuff that's not going to be on your mainstream documentaries but actually happened. And this is going to be Henry Ford's episode, which I've wanted to do for a long time.
Speaker 2:It's a guy that fascinates me and I remember reading in Napoleon Hill's book Think and Grow Rich when I was a kid I mean, I say a kid, I was in my 20s, but I was reading that book and there's this story about Henry Ford and he was suing one of the papers in Michigan I think it was Dearborn Michigan. He was suing the paper and they countersued him because of libel. They said he was stupid. And because of libel, they said he was stupid, like he was like an imbecile, he didn't know history and he was on the stand and they kept questioning him about okay, well, how many British soldiers were lost in the Revolutionary War? How many ships did we have in our Navy in the time of 1812? Just obscure stuff that really only true historians that specialized in that would know. And finally he lost his temper and he said on my desk I have a series of buttons and when I want to know something I press a button and a man walks in and tells me so I don't have to do that because my job is to put the world on wheels. Like he literally just lost his temper, like I can't retain all that. It's cluttering my mind. I just have a series of buttons on my desk and I will push a button and someone will appear if I have a question. And I always thought that was great.
Speaker 2:And of course, uh, will Durant in his book, uh, the lessons of history, which, if you, if you're interested in a book that is a synopsis of, like, all of human history, that's what Will Durant did. He wrote the story of civilization and the story of philosophy and it's like 11 volumes. And he starts out that book, the Lessons of History, quotes Henry Ford who said that history was bunk. And it certainly is. And we'll jump. You know, napoleon said that history was a pack of lies agreed upon. But I think I like Ford's quote better. But, mr Anderson, welcome back to your show with your brain. Sir, thank you for being here.
Speaker 3:Happy to be here. Yeah, that case that you're referring to, I think they tried to trip him up on, like who Benedict Arnold was and all sorts of different things, and it reminded me kind of what they did to Gary Johnson in 2016.
Speaker 2:With Aleppo.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Remember he was confused about some world event and they just leapt on that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was. You know you'd have to be kind of a policy wonk you know to know what that is, and if you weren't paying attention to foreign policy, like you weren't reading the digest for the council on foreign relations. That's a question. You know that.
Speaker 3:You're not a member wait a minute, you don't know qualified yeah, they did that same thing to trump.
Speaker 2:Uh, who was a u u it that tried to trip up trump on that in the 2016 election. He was like uh, the, the coods forces? And he thought he's talking about the Kurds and the Quds. Like is the? Like an elite Iranian military force? He tried to like see, I got you. You don't know who the Quds forces are, it's just you know that's policy wonk stuff. But big picture, is what Henry Ford was all about and you know he certainly had, I think, a lot of ingenious ways to make our reality better, especially with the automobile, and we'll get into some of the things his philosophy on wages and being anti-war and all the rest.
Speaker 3:But yeah, that's how it kind of kicked off is. Last week you and I were talking about we passed the 111th anniversary it was on January 5th 1914, him introducing the five-hour workday and that meant he essentially doubled the minimum wage for his workers at the time, which extrapolated out to a factor of 10 in average savings that they were able to grow a year. And that was really unheard of at the time. And he didn't do that with the stranglehold of the government or the government breathing down his neck. He just introduced that. And to put that into some context, we might understand. If you adjust for inflation, that's a $20 per hour minimum wage there. It is right there and, as you pointed out, it's actually more than that right. You could buy a five-dollar, yeah purchasing power.
Speaker 2:I don't know if I buy the metrics on inflation because of the you were pointing out like five dollars. Well, a five dollar gold Indian is worth. You know that's one of the. I have a two and a half dollar gold Indian around my neck. You know this is one of those coins. This is worth about three hundred dollars in gold. So I mean, you know $5 would be close to 500 bucks or so and a minimum purchasing power. So yeah, it was certainly. I mean that's not what it was. I mean it's not 500, but it's close. I mean it's a significant wage. It allowed his workers to afford the products they were making off the assembly line, which is what, in an egalitarian way, his vision was. He was not like the robber barons and the Rockefellers. He was not of that mindset, and we'll get into some of that today.
Speaker 3:No, they disliked him and he disliked them.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:But yeah, and later on down the line he introduced the eight-hour workday and five-day workweek.
Speaker 3:Again, he did this on his own volition, it was his idea because he really did believe in being good to workers even though he was adamantly anti-union.
Speaker 3:But these things that helped propel the middle class forward and introduced in many ways the American Industrial Revolution made a lot of people uneasy and mad, particularly his shareholders and investors. And one of the reasons he went from a nine-hour workday to eight hours is because now, he thought, now I have three full shifts in the day, so I don't have to close down the business even for an hour, it can just keep running and they're going to be happier because they're making better wages and all the competitors are offering wages that are about half of this. So I'm going to get good talent and if you treat your talent well and your workers well, they'll stay with you and you can retain them. But what you're talking about, I think kind of cuts into a lot of people, undercut a lot of these achievements and decisions he made because he held what they refer to as anti-Semitic views. He had like an anti-war editorial in the Ford newspaper and I think the first one that was published in 1912, it was called the International Jew the World's Problem.
Speaker 3:And in that he blamed World War I on the Jews and he was, you know, on record saying the Lusitania victims had been warned.
Speaker 2:Well, that's true.
Speaker 3:It's true. And he also said war, particularly World War. I had nothing to do with American interests or the interests of the average American, I know he blamed the war on the monetary policies that were pushed forward by the bankers. And he said a lot of the cultural depravity that had been taking place, particularly in Hollywood. It was all controlled by this same group of people. So he was one of the first ones to write about this.
Speaker 3:He actually consolidated all these articles in a book and I think in 1922, that book was printed in German and Adolf Hitler got a copy of it. So in Mein Kampf he actually mentions Henry Ford and supposedly had a life-size portrait of Henry Ford in his office. And in 1938, the Nazi party I know this stuff's kind of bad office and in 1938, the Nazi party, I know this stuff's kind of bad he awarded Henry Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, which was the highest medal they could bestow upon a foreigner. So all this stuff is true. But what Henry Ford was saying about World War I, monetary policy, you know, hollywood and all the cultural ramifications, those aren't untrue in my opinion.
Speaker 2:But when Hitler's endorsing Association doesn't make the thing untrue, right? Association with some darkness doesn't mean that the thing you said was untrue. That's the game that we play now. It's like any association with anything that we find unacceptable means that your premise is false, which is again a bunk I'll put it that way fortified with slave labor, that they had people who would otherwise be in concentration camps working there.
Speaker 3:So in 2001, ford Motor Company paid $5 billion in reparations for this. So I don't know more about that Maybe you or Chris can speak on it, but that actually did happen too. So he had some troubling relationships, I guess, with the other side. But a lot of the things and the reasons why he was saying it was because Ford Motor Company was really the third variation of him trying to make an affordable automobile and every time it happened he was kind of focused on perfection, whereas the shareholders were focused on profit. So he always got pushed out these bankers, these shareholders and he thought they had something in common and he had a real gripe with that.
Speaker 2:I think somebody asked him one time there was a game show contestant who won a bunch of trivia. And they said a game show contestant who won a bunch of trivia. And they said, hey, would you hire this guy? He knows a lot of trivia. And he said how much would you pay him? And Henry Ford said I'd pay him a lump sum of $300. And I said for life. And like yeah, he goes, because that's what an encyclopedia costs. He just said I can get the same thing out of an encyclopedia. He's very pragmatic with that. He just said I can get the same thing out of him. He's very pragmatic with that.
Speaker 2:You know, in pop culture too. You're right about the associations, and that was the time he was in. I will defend him in the sense that where you had, what was it? The Union Banking Corporation with Prescott Bush, and you know the Bushes had the association of trading with the enemy. I mean, they violated the Trading with the Enemies Act. That's why you have the USO. That was started by the Bushes for a PR campaign, because they literally even after the start of the war in 1939, going into the 41 and beyond they were still doing business with the Nazis. They weren't anti-war or, you know, trying to make peace. That was just about profit.
Speaker 2:Henry ford was, I think he was. He liked the, the peace time conditions for business. He felt like that was better for businesses, better for workers, better for civilization. He's smart, you know, and that's, but that it's unfortunate because you bleed into pop culture. And I remember watching this episode of American dad years and years ago and one of one of the things that, like the Steve character, he has this, he just he has this house. When he becomes famous or something, and he and somebody breaks the gumball machine, he goes that's the gumball machine that Henry Ford gave Hitler. He's like it's like bleeds into popular culture.
Speaker 3:Well, he did some nice stuff too. I mean, this really caught my attention in light of what's going on in California, Los Angeles, particularly right now. But in 1906, San Francisco had that huge earthquake and all those fires resulted and it destroyed something like 80% of the buildings that were in the city and I think there's an estimated 3000 or so that were dead from all of this upheaval. And at the time in 1906, Ford hadn't even been selling model A's that well, let alone in the West, which there were still a lot of horse-drawn buggies and things like that. There were still a lot of horse-drawn buggies and things like that. But the dealers there in San Francisco lent out all of their Model A so they could assist with all these cleanup efforts and with all the upheaval that had been happening. So he donated all of these things and even, I believe, shipped in some more and just told the city and the state you can pay me back when you can Like, when you have the money, just pay me back.
Speaker 3:But what a stark contrast that is to what's going on now. I see like nobody who would be of similar stature as Henry Ford doing anything like that. I saw in the news that we're flying in fire experts from Mexico and Canada, and it's like it doesn't matter how much you know about fires if you don't have water to fight them. And California, here's the Pacific ocean. But, like we were, we were joking before the show started. I mean, if your governor is the antichrist, you know he doesn't have much interest in putting out fires.
Speaker 2:He likes to fight. You see that somebody did a side-by-side comparison. They had the movie Constantine, where he goes to hell and walks through and it's just like this burning landscape, and then somebody put it right next to him. There's this McDonald's on fire and real in the real world, and it looks exactly the same. Courtney loves it and didn't him he's. He's growing taller, growing younger.
Speaker 3:That Courtney loves it. And he's growing taller, growing younger. Yeah, that's what I saw. If you compare photos from two weeks ago and you measure the height, he's grown three-quarters of an inch. Can you believe that, Tony?
Speaker 2:I can. He's going to be eight feet tall by the time he grows stronger in your pain. He's going to go to the French Laundry and celebrate.
Speaker 3:All levity aside aside.
Speaker 2:It's just ridiculous so it's, it's painful to watch and you know I have friends that we have friends there and uh, it's just, it's just really sad to watch in this country with that kind of it's like something's on fire. We can't put it out like we're. We're the american, american people. What are you talking about? Just not allowing that innovation, you know, and the community to work because of the political structure and the toxicity of bureaucracy, and we don't have entrepreneurs like Henry Ford anymore. I mean, you can say what you will about his associations, but, like I remember stories about reading, this is, you know, years of reading about ford, but you're right about his. He wanted the people that made things in his factories and he was, by the way, we don't give him enough credit for the innovation of the assembly line. Yeah, you know, yeah, he saw it in chicago.
Speaker 3:right, he was at a meat packing plant and saw the conveyor belts and how seamlessly everything ran and it said why can't we utilize this in the automotive industry? He took something that was a 12-hour process to assemble a car and now it's 90 minutes.
Speaker 2:It's like a totally different type of entrepreneur, because he really got started about my age, you know, a little bit, maybe a little bit younger, but it's about 45 or so. That's what I've you know, as far as what I've researched and when he really got started and you contrast that today with what you think of. You know you go online and look on Instagram and there's, you know, and then God love them. You know they're trying, but all of these small, you know up and coming entrepreneurs and tech guys, you know, and they got the Lambos and everything and the glitz, and he was more about what can I make? How can I make something innovative and beautiful and do something different and efficient? You know better than anyone has ever done it. And, at the same time, how do I help my people, which I see my people as a resource and the modern employment is not.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's like you get the Mitt Romneys of the world with their nomenclature is venture capitalists, but actually what they are is vulture capitalists. They just buy things, break them up and try to strip away the humanity out of them and get down to the bottom line instead of because if everybody humanity out of them and get down to the bottom line instead of because if everybody. You know, my thing is John Nash, you know that the the movie the beautiful mind, when he came up with the economic equilibrium or something he was saying like you know, if, if everybody cooperates, if there's cooperation in the, the capitalistic system and the economy, then you actually can grow bigger. If, if you're not just all for yourself and I think there's something to that If everybody wins. That's my philosophy with my team. I like bonuses, I like to time off all this stuff because they take care of my interests Well.
Speaker 3:Bill Burr had a bit about this because he really disliked Steve Jobs to the point it became almost like a caricature of who Steve Jobs was. You know him just walking around, said well, like a pear or something, telling people you know, this is my entire music collection, showing them all the records and say, now get it in my phone. That's a different type of entrepreneur. I mean, ford was really smart. I mean he was kind of self-taught.
Speaker 3:He worked as a machinist starting at 16, because he was infatuated by the idea of using these steam powered engines to power automobiles or cars or things without tracks and displace this kind of paradigm of the buggy and the horse and displace this kind of paradigm of, you know, the buggy and the horse. But he worked at Westinghouse and then he worked at Edison Illumination Co. Just like Tesla. I mean he was a really smart guy. So you're mixing like all of this prowess with him as an entrepreneur with being a really technically savvy individual, which is just crazy to me. And also, if we're going to talk about A Beautiful Mind, you know you got to give a shout out to Jennifer Connelly, right? She was about 40 in that movie, I think, or maybe.
Speaker 2:No, she wasn't 40. Was she?
Speaker 3:younger. Oh, maybe, maybe he was, maybe he was.
Speaker 2:I think that was like 2003, 2002, 2003, right, Chris?
Speaker 1:Beautiful Mind was 1999, I believe Was it really I believe, so we're both off.
Speaker 2:Okay, chris would know. I mean we defer to Chris on modern pop culture movie timelines, for sure.
Speaker 1:For any of you, Friday the 13th and Halloween trivia I'm back, baby.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, that's funny. We got that wrong while you were gone.
Speaker 1:I know you did, I saw it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I Well, yeah, that's funny, we got that wrong while you were gone.
Speaker 1:I know you did, I saw it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I just got you though.
Speaker 2:Chris, that's what I'm talking about. I was channeling you, chris, because I was like wait a minute, wait a minute when Mr Anderson was referencing Amy.
Speaker 1:Lee Curtis, amy Lee Curtis, when he was not in Friday the 13th.
Speaker 2:You were speaking through me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's right, I was Friday the 13th, you were speaking through me. Yeah, that's right, I was.
Speaker 1:Tony thought there was some larger point I was going to make after three minutes of rattling off all this.
Speaker 2:No, you heard her being hermaphrodite supposedly, beauty is a pair of truths there, folks. This is ADD live. We are live with ADD and lots of pop culture and historical references. You might learn something Maybe.
Speaker 1:Maybe I do have something besides reparations the Ford Motor Company, and this was November 1st 1998. The Ford Motor Company they had a commercial-free sponsorship of NBC's airing of Schindler's List, so we'll add that to the reparations, I guess.
Speaker 2:Well, they're trying to clean up their image Pretty much. Yeah, well, mr Anderson referenced earlier and this is where we're going to get into this but one of the things that Henry Ford did was I think this was post-World War I he just started to circulate the because of the lore and the things that that that book, that pamphlet, you know everything that's come out of that and the history behind it. But he, he printed that for years and then stopped and then it was like an abrupt stop and he, I don't think did he ever, mr Anderson, did he offer up any sort of explanation why you stopped printing that?
Speaker 3:I didn't see an explanation why. It was probably because of all the flack he was catching because of it, but he ended up consolidating all of those into, I think, three or four different books, A lot of the things that he was writing about. I said one reached Hitler. I mean you don't want a shout out in Mein Kampf? I mean you just don't.
Speaker 1:You've got to get a PR move. Knuckle bumps.
Speaker 2:In a major publication. It's like that's really bad, that's good, you don't want to be in that. Now he had the unfortunate. You know it's funny.
Speaker 2:So, in that line of logic I've talked about this many times there's a reason why that the term America first was not used up until it took in Trump's campaign in 2016. 2016, I used it a bit, but I knew the dynamite that was in that phraseology and so whenever you say what's what they did, they took, you know, associations with, like Henry Ford had with the Third Reich or whatever you know he's mentioned in Mein Kampf and everything else, but he was anti-war. And then you have, like Lindbergh and others. Even you know there were so many major figures in the America First movement in the late 1930s, early 1940s and, because of what happened afterwards and what you know, with the final solution and the Holocaust and everything else, to be against that war was associated with anti-Semitism and you couldn't use the phrase without being lumped into. So it's it's come a long way and that's interesting. Like you know, he he had a peace envoy, what's a lot of people don't? He wanted to have.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he wanted to end World War One. What timeline was that?
Speaker 3:The peace envoy. Yeah, I guess around World War.
Speaker 2:I Was it 1917 or so, he tried to stop the war.
Speaker 3:I don't remember the year we're talking about the First World War. First World War. Yeah, he went over there. Was it like a Scandinavian country? He visited, or something like that with a peace envoy, and I mean he was almost immediately turned away.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they just shut him down and that's the tell.
Speaker 3:And I think there was a little bit more going on, like in reading and researching this. No one really talked about this point directly, but I think he had not really the best of relationships with the United Kingdom, because that's actually what propelled Fordlandia, which is something not a lot of people know about, which was something else we discussed about overviewing on the show, and what that essentially amounts to is we've kind of covered like how in the 1920s Henry Ford was this big player in the American Industrial Revolution and around a half of the American cars on the roads I put that in quotes were Ford. So again, he introduced the assembly line. It reduced the turnaround on making cars to around 90 minutes, and this entire time he was very pro-worker but anti-union. But one of the other things he was doing in parallel was he had a goal to own, operate and manage all the supply lines that he was dependent upon, Meaning, if you needed glass in your car, we're going to make that glass at Ford Motor Company, Outward steel, we're going to do that. Engines, transmissions.
Speaker 3:But there was a real bottleneck with rubber. At the time. There were no synthetic alternatives to rubber. It was all imported from South America, particularly Brazil, I think at its peak, Brazil was responsible for 90 percent of the rubber that was imported for automotive manufacture. Now, it was reasonable to do this at the time. But then the United Kingdom got in the game and they started producing rubber plantations throughout their colonies, so in particular Malaysia, Sri Lanka, parts of Africa. And Winston Churchill at the time was Secretary of State for the British Commonwealth and he just decided, after they gained the advantage and a lot of the companies that were making natural rubber and exporting it from Brazil went under that he was going to throttle production. So what did this mean? It meant that natural rubber went from around 20 cents a pound to around one hundred and twenty dollars a pound.
Speaker 3:And this really pissed Henry Ford off. So he started looking for alternatives Again. He worked at Edison's illumination company for a while. He had a good relationship with them, so they started investigating synthetic alternatives to rubber. But nothing came of it at the time.
Speaker 3:Then he looked to the Florida Everglades, just said I'm going to make a grove of rubber trees, I'm going to have my own plantation, I'm going to do this myself. But investors caught wind of it before he was able to purchase the land, bought it and then tried to sell it to him as a markup. And at this point he threw up his hands and said screw, all of this. And he had been reading at the time it was around 1926, I think he was reading Teddy Roosevelt's published memoirs of his travels through the Amazon and how Teddy mentioned that this area was ripe for industrialization. So this really piqued his interest in Brazil. He looked at it, researched it and ended up buying over 2 million acres from the country of Brazil, with the agreement being 7% of the profit share would go to the Brazilian government and about 2.5% to local municipalities. But I'm saying all of that to. This might be another reason he was kind of anti-war, not helping the United Kingdom in World War II because they really pissed him off, particularly Winston Churchill.
Speaker 2:Oh, they were awful.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The British Empire is the warmongering interventionist Awful, I mean, they always play the victim. But you know it's funny. But a lot of people don't understand, like you, go back to the timeline of World War Two and it was the British that declared war on Germany, not the other way around. And they gave a war guarantee to Poland, and that was really shocked. The Third Reich why did you do that? We were negotiating with them, with the port of donzing, and we're offering them the autobahn, all this other stuff. We wanted to get that port of donzing back was a german speaking. That was taken at the treaty of versailles. You have to get way beyond the soundbites to understand. But that, yeah, it was. You know neville chamberlain. He's always thrown under the bus for saying we have peace in our time in Munich. But it was the British government that declared war on Germany in 1939, not the other way around.
Speaker 3:To protect the sovereignty of Poland, and then, after the war, we gave Poland a stalemate.
Speaker 2:Here's a worse monster. I hope you like this one better. You know it's really insane. That's called a good war. You know World War II is 50 million dead. The world turned upside down atomic bombs. Uh, but that was all over poland, and then we gave poland to stalin makes no sense, but that's right. But it's the good war, right? That's what we have to. We have to go back to that. What are you saying, chris?
Speaker 1:the peace ship was uh november of 1915 okay, that's what I was thinking.
Speaker 2:Yeah, uh, so it would. So the lusitania was may of 1915 and a lot of people don't realize that they wanted to get the lusitania. This was a ploy and, by the way, winston churchill had his hand in this, that he made sure the lusitania went through a certain section, so it would have the most probability of getting hit by a German U-boat. And you're right about the publication that came out from the German government to warn the passengers on the Lusitania, which was carrying munitions, by the way. That's why it blew up a bunch of times. It wasn't like it just got hit and it sank.
Speaker 3:And why they didn't manifest right.
Speaker 2:Right, I mean it was. I mean clearly it was. It was we were shipping things over and, you know, outside of our neutrality and the German government knew that. And but people think, oh well, the Lusitania was sunk and that's why we got into World War I. No, woodrow Wilson ran in 1916 on the slogan he kept us out of war. That's 1916. The Lusitania is 1915 in May, and that wasn't even used. That was used as an afterthought.
Speaker 2:Really, what it was that got us into World War I was the Zimmer, the telegram from the Rothschilds agent inside Germany to send a telegram to the Mexican consulate saying that if Mexico joined Germany that they could have the Southwest back when Germany defeated the United States. It was like some weird outlandish thing and that was enough popular sway Plus. Woodrow Wilson straight up lied. You know he said we kept this out. He had no intention of keeping us out of the war. So it was people like Henry Ford that were understanding the gravity of what happened to the Lusitania way ahead of time and saying we got to stay out of this thing because there is a pointless slaughter Like you.
Speaker 2:Look at World War I and it's just humanity is absolute worst. There's no redeeming anything. What was gained? Nothing. It was an entire generation of the French. There were so many women that were left without being able to marry anyone because the men of age had been cut down, and they lost an entire generation of men above a certain height. Because of this the trench warfare a lot of people make fun of the french. You know they're saying like uh, you know the about, and this rifle's like a french rifle. It's uh, you know it's never been fired and only dropped one. You know but, um, but you hear, but they didn't want to get lose them. You know hundreds of thousands and you know millions of casualties. I mean they got the war beat out of them in that slaughter pen of the Western Front. So I mean you can't really blame them.
Speaker 1:It was a terrible thing. You always get criticized. If you don't want war, yeah, tell me about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've paid a price for that I got when I get into, uh, traditional media and they're like, hey, we got ourselves a combat veteran. And I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna oppose all these foreign interventions, like we got to get rid of this combat we're gonna go, you're not cleaning your gun during an interview, yeah, yeah just looking down.
Speaker 3:Well, I'll tell'll. Tell you, bill, what I think about that. It's appallishing, but yeah. So I think that probably played a little bit of a role in why he again didn't want to be involved in World War II. And I mean, that's just unheard of 20 cents a pound, $120 a pound. That would make me mad too if I didn't have any alternatives.
Speaker 2:Tell us about Fordlandia.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it started in 1928, the idea of it, that's when they first broke ground. But, like I said, he found a place in Brazil which was known for producing rubber trees and it was about, I think, 500 miles inland but it was still adjacent to, I believe, the Topaz River in the Amazon. And so he reached this agreement with the Brazilian government that he could purchase over 2 million acres of this land, and he actually purchased two decommissioned freighters I believe they were called Lake Orak and Lake Farge. So the idea was to use these freighters to transport all the items they'd need, because you're essentially starting from scratch. I mean, the forest where you want to plant the trees hasn't even been cleared yet. So all your electric generators, your concrete mixers, major machinery, all of that. So he had, like this idea where he was going to create this town called Fordlandia and kind of adjacent to it he was going to have this place for the American workers and their families called Villa Americano, and in it he kind of imagined like you know, you're going to have all your power, your water needs met, we're going to have tennis courts, cinemas, golf course, all this good stuff. But it ended up being more like fire festival in the end, but anyways. So they shipped out the managers, the engineers that needed and doctors, because they're going to have on-site care hospital, you know, with all the machinery that you need like x-rays and all the other things for surgeries.
Speaker 3:And while they were shipping all of this equipment on the freighters, along with the American workers, the Brazilians started breaking ground because, again, it was wild, there were no proper facilities there initially, but the Brazilians ended up like scorching the earth. They used, I think, kerosene as an accelerant, so the flames grew like 100 feet tall. There's ash everywhere, people were suffering from heat strokes and then in that first year, in 1928, there's this huge malaria outbreak. But there were no hospitals on site at the time. So something short of 100 people died. And to make matters work, those two freighters were late because they arrived at their passage down the river, at that site, at a time where the river was only nine feet wide. So all these things that they needed to start building the community just weren't there. So they started selling barges down and hiring people, brazilians, to take all of this equipment, all these supplies down. Take all of this equipment, all these supplies down.
Speaker 3:And in 1930, they eventually got stuff. There they had some success. The managers of Ford arrived. They had like a smokestack, docks, the heavy equipment. They built some warehouses and shops and the groves of rubber trees have been planted but they hadn't harvested anything yet. So this is like two years into the mission. But they had a cafeteria, a trauma center like I was mentioning, and all those things.
Speaker 3:But the Brazilians weren't really adapting to the new schedule. So Ford wanted them to work eight-hour stint days where they had been used to split, shifting their time to avoid the heat in the middle of the day, because you're talking, you know, 105 degrees Fahrenheit out there, it's hot. And then another thing that was instituted is they needed to wear full length suits and boots, not barefoot. They weren't supposed to work barefoot, like they were accommodated to doing or used to doing, and this was for safety reasons. But it was hotter.
Speaker 3:And then the funny thing too we didn't mention this earlier but Ford had restrictions on your personal life, like if you were an employee at Ford, there were these things called laws of propriety that you were supposed to obey. He wasn't a drinker, he wasn't a smoker, so he frowned upon those things. Cohabitation if you weren't married, just just being sexual in general outside of marriage, and so he actually introduced those same laws here no gambling, no drinking in town. So they actually created this town a little further downstream called the Island of Innocence, and it had all your bars and brothels. It's like the Patriot Act, and it had all your bars and brothels, except the Patriot Act and after they went to those brothels.
Speaker 3:I guess they really disliked getting routine physicals, because Ford Motor Company did those too. But eventually the American workers also grew discontent a couple of years in, because they were behind schedule. They were asking for raises but they weren't harvesting, they weren't exporting anything that was valuable that could be used in the automotive business at this time. So they started skimming money off the top, which left less money for the community and put them even more behind where they wanted to be financially. So it eventually culminated in this revolt be financially. So it eventually culminated in this revolt. So after they had like the town together, the Americans and the Brazilians had won the kind of the war against the jungle, the tensions between Americans and Brazilians rose and so Ford sent new managers and overhauled the cafeteria, which was the thing supposedly that set this thing over the edge, where he changed the menu. He wants you just to eat like oatmeal and fruit and bread, and they didn't like that, they weren't used to that, those sorts of meals. He changed the cafeteria layout from being open to being enclosed, with the tar roof would trap the heat. And then he made the meals no longer free and they just deducted the cost of the meals from the paycheck and it was now self-service child lines.
Speaker 3:So a brawl broke out in 1933. And the Brazilian workers? They looted everything, they cut the telegraph lines, flipped all the automobiles and burned them, set fire to the train station and went after the Americans, which again they were at the American villa and they were shouting things like Brazil's for Brazilians, kill the Americans. And so this lasted, I think, around two days, before the Brazilian government was dispatched and was able to restore order. But the workers at this time had unionized and they had demands, and Ford just entirely rejected their collective bargaining and threatened to close down the company. So the army didn't want that, brazil didn't want that. So the army removed the leaders on Christmas Eve in 1933, shut down the island of innocence and it did like half a million in damage.
Speaker 3:And so this is five years into this project of fordlandia and they still hadn't harvested or exported any rubber. And so they realized that they had a problem, actually, because all the trees were blighted or stunted and they just weren't producing. And so they hired a plant pathologist to do the consulting. He's like hey, y'all change the ecosystem down here, because y'all planted the trees way too densely. They're far too packed and close together, which meant this was like a buffet for all the fungus and bugs, and so that's why your trees aren't growing, because you changed the whole structure of the ecosystem here. So they actually had to abandon the site and they created another one that was called Belterra I think it was like 50, 70 miles away from Fordlandia and it was successful for a few years. But after all this time they eventually introduced this synthetic version of rubber, so it was like no longer necessary, and Henry Borden died in 1947, and they just sold their holdings Ford Motor Company to the Brazilian government.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it says here. In 1930, the native workers grew tired of Ford's imposed diet, in addition to a change with how the food was distributed, and revolted in the town's cafeteria. This became known as the breaking pans. The rebels proceeded to cut the telegraph wires and chased away the managers, and even took the town's cook into the jungle for a few days until the brazilian army arrived and the revolt ended. Yeah, and then it goes down. It says in 2009, an NPR article reported not one drop of latex from Fordlandia ever made it into a Ford car.
Speaker 3:That's ridiculous. He invested a lot into it and it wasn't a bad idea. They just probably should have hired, you know, an ecologist beforehand. You know how the other plantations were doing well. Growing rubber trees in the Amazon is they were like sparsely planted, but they wanted to really pack them in and apparently, again that was just fertile grounds for all these bugs and fungus. So it wasn't like a bad idea. And again he he. His initial idea was to start it in florida until he was undercut by investors.
Speaker 2:So the town remained inhabited by roughly 90 people until the later half of the 2000s. No basic services were offered in the area, with medical help only coming by boat at long intervals. That changed when people looking for places to live decided to go back into the town, often claiming houses. The town, now a district of Averio, was home to nearly 3000 people as of 2017. So they people gone back in and reclaimed the houses, but it's just a town that's been repurposed.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it was a very ambitious idea, especially that far away and that inland you know you're talking about.
Speaker 1:Do you know if he ever made an attempt to do that right here in the United States, like with one of these towns.
Speaker 3:No, all I came across was he was interested in some area in the Florida Everglades, but before he purchased someone else did, and then they were interested in selling it to him, but at a marked price, and he was just like this is ridiculous. So he didn't. And when they got the second town rolling and actually producing some rubber again, they started manufacturing synthetic rubber. So it became kind of an unnecessary thing to continue to do. Right, but yeah, I always thought the laws of propriety, like he had 50 people in his social department, they would go to people's houses, figure out where they like to hang out and they would just snoop on them. So if you, would you not do? Well, chris, you just shook your head well, I wouldn't do well, I wouldn't do.
Speaker 1:Well, they'd be like he's too boring there's one thing well, yeah, there's one thing with, like you know, people, you know, signing a contract, a decency clause, but to have like a whole police force to kind of investigate your private affairs when you're mining, mining your own business, and obeying the law and everything, that's pretty ridiculous in my opinion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, those kinds of cults of personality happen around. I mean, you get to a certain point and you know he, he, he knew his place in history, and so the ego takes over at some level and he's pushing that. You know, whatever his, whatever construct he has of himself and the way he feels like he's most efficient. And it's definitely the mind of an assembly line guy who's figuring out how to better make something. And then you realize, like the human condition is so much more complicated so it's probably not somebody you'd want to like. He didn't want to have a beer with you anyway, so it's not like somebody you want to drink?
Speaker 3:yeah, he. I'm curious if y'all came across this, because he also had this thing called the ford service department and that was aimed at strong arming groups of people that were trying to form unions. Did y'all come across any of that?
Speaker 3:no only from you, on the sense yeah, there was this fixer he had for like over 30 years. His name was harry bennett. He was like this fiery short redhead guy I guess he was. He was irish but he was, uh, formerly in the us navy and was likea champion lightweight boxer. And yeah, apparently ford saw him get into a street brawl in New York City, was kind of keen on getting to know this guy, ended up meeting with him, hiring him, and this guy started hiring, like ex-boxers, ex-football players, ex-gang members, members, and any time the American, the auto workers unions, tried to, you know, come over to Ford Motor Company or convince people to unionize. They had their way with them. They did all sorts of stuff. There was like one day I forget which day it was, but there was a massacre. Like four people were killed, like police were shooting in on the crowd and it was eventually thwarted out, but, you know, not after, not until people had died. But yeah, this was called the Ford service department. So he did a lot of shady stuff like that too.
Speaker 2:Well, I go back to you know his desire again. He saw people as assets and I think that was a departure from the robber barons and others. I mean the reason why you had this big socialist movement in the early 20th century with people, writers like Jack London who wrote the Call of the Wild. He was what he referred to himself as a work beast. I mean it was like if you didn't have a way to get, there was no path to the middle class, you could only scrape by because the wages were so low, the profits were high, the monopolists controlled everything. So Ford's departure, I mean, deserves the accolades and the. I think the recognition of somebody who saw that you know, I think the recognition of somebody who saw that you know, people are an asset, especially in, you know, quality of work. And he, he really, it really affected him when his people unionized and he cried, they said I don't. It broke his heart. He really thought like these are my people, my family, and I don't know why they're doing this to me again. And then you find like I'm pro-union because I'm a populist in many ways. I mean I have a hodgepodge of ideologies that flow together, maybe might be contradictory, because I believe in the free market and the rest, but I do believe that you know, people should have the ability to unionize.
Speaker 2:Maybe in this time frame it's been bastardized and lost its meaning, but so much of it has roots and you know, you find where the mob and you know Jimmy Hoffa and that's where you think of, like, the United Auto Workers and all that stuff that there's just so much of that in that vein where it's not just about the people and the unions blew it here in this country, like they let these, these companies. You know they didn't oppose NAFTA. They could have killed NAFTA. The unions could have killed NAFTA. They didn't. They didn't do that, they stood by, or just like they're the neutral or they were for it, which is bizarre, you know, and then they vote for people who are for more of that stuff. I'm like, well, you're gutting the manufacturing. So I've never understood the modern unions, but I guess I have sympathy for at least the beginning of the 20th century, where you mentioned that Ford goes to Chicago to learn the assembly line in a meatpacking plant and that's where you get, you know, the jungle.
Speaker 3:Exactly Right. Yep, that's exactly what I was thinking when I came across that they came across that and uh, who wrote the?
Speaker 2:why am I losing?
Speaker 3:the thread and claire upton sinclair.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he also wrote the book oil, where the the book uh, that was the there will be, there will be blood is based off that, that book oil. Upton sinclair ran for governor of California too. He was one of those turn of the century socialists, kind of like Jack London, you know that had a lot of good points, and wasn't it like there was other? So they jailed them, like Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas, I think, and some of the others, but they weren't necessarily, they weren't like commies. You know, like it was just a different. We've lost that thread. It's either like you wrote it on one and now it's all. I think most political ideologies are just fake. Like I don't think, like people even know what they're talking about. You know, like I'm still I think the anti-war left is viewed less than Bigfoot. You know where do people go. I'm still. I think the anti-war left is viewed less than Bigfoot.
Speaker 3:You know I agree with you, tony. It's kind of a mixing of contradictions, because I'm with you. I mean, I like to view myself as a populist and if you look back, even if you trace back to the origins of Labor Day and the conditions that provoked that sort of response having that day, they were utterly terrible, I mean because so many workers didn't have protection. But now you have what was it? A couple of months ago? What was that guy's name? He's going to shut down the country. Right, the union worker boss, remember he was. He was threatening oh, yeah, yeah, I remember that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and now that's your caricature of something yeah it's from looney tunes. It's not well it's mostly.
Speaker 2:I mean like modern politics is just intellectually bankrupt. You know like I mean. I my hobby horse is always, uh, make fun of the modern conservative movement, because they have so many underlying contradictions that like cancel out each other, like we're for small government but blow them up all over uh, well, it's just we got to get over there for israel and we have to bomb the hell out of everybody.
Speaker 2:You know, it's like I get back from iraq and I just would go to church or something and hear people always got to turn that whole area into a parking lot. I'm like genocide, a sheet of glass. We just got turned into a sheet of glass, you know.
Speaker 1:Now let's pray.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like what, what it was. Just there's so many contradictions, like willful, it's like willful, willful.
Speaker 3:Campaign. Yeah, his character in the campaign. Oh yeah, what's his slogan?
Speaker 2:It's for America, freedom, america, jesus, america and freedom, or something like that.
Speaker 3:And he likes the cheerleader in the audience. You got a lot of energy. I find that so many people haven't seen that movie and they need to.
Speaker 2:They ran a good camp man. That's a good show and he had some good slogans. You could take something from that. But he didn't like policy, and that's that's modern politics. I mean we didn't have any policy in the last election.
Speaker 2:It's like nobody, nobody's talking about policy. I mean literally like if you study my wheelhouse, I'm looking at the fiscal house that's on fire and you're like is anybody going to talk about the debt? Because we used to talk about that. We don't do that anymore. So I think I mean politics has degenerated into idiocracy. You can call it that. And then, you know, just kind of go back to our original premise here, just talking about an American entrepreneur, like we don't really have those types of personalities anymore. And I don't think, you know, certainly this is the difference between Ford and somebody like an Elon Musk or something. Now, I mean, ford wasn't pushing for government contracts. Yeah, you know, like he he could have got a lot of contracts. I'm sure he did. From the wars, you know, especially during world war two, yeah, um, to produce. And then they did. I mean they took the cars right off the assembly line and put in tanks.
Speaker 3:Well, that's how Indian motorcycle went out of business. Because Indian motorcycle made a, because India Motorcycle made the motorcycle before Harley-Davidson, yeah, but they apparently, from what I remember, got a huge or were awarded a huge government contract. I think it was World War II, maybe it was World War I, I can't remember. But what ended up happening is they ended up getting stiffed after they made all these motorcycles. The government just didn't pay them and they went bankrupt. These motorcycles, the government just didn't pay them and they went bankrupt. So I mean, it's, it's dicey sometimes dealing contractually with the government too yeah, ask howard hughes, we should do an episode.
Speaker 2:We need to do an episode we're gonna do like an entrepreneur's uh.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, do the aviator they got a lot on him. Yeah, man, he's a. That's a rabbit hole. Yeah, what if you grab?
Speaker 2:it. Interesting guy too interesting, chris, did you find?
Speaker 1:anything else on ford fordlandia? Oh man, that's a rabbit hole. Yeah, quite a few rabbit holes Interesting guy too Interesting.
Speaker 3:Chris, did you find anything else on Fordlandia that you wanted to mention?
Speaker 1:I just went with the Peace Ship when it was being talked about. No, this was your expertise, man. The only time I really came across Ford was with the banker plot with Smedley Butler Go into that. Well, I don't have the notes in front of me right now, but he was one of them that were named before Congress that supposedly partook. Is that the right word?
Speaker 2:He was one of the supposed co-conspirators. I think that's BS, I think that entire thing, and we've talked about this before. They knew Smedley Butler would his character. He wrote War is a Racket, but he was also the most highly decorated general up until that time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Marine, ever, you know, up until that time, to gain sympathy in any kind of public opposition to what Roosevelt was doing. Because if you look at like Roosevelt's first hundred days, that's where that's why you hear about a modern presidency it's like, oh, what's the first hundred days look like? Because that's what post night, you know he was elected in 32 and talking about FDR, and then you know you get the his speech and on March 4th, 33, uh, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. By the way, he took that from Napoleon Hill. And then you know you've got his first hundred days and he gets to the crescendo and he starts trying to pack the Supreme Court because they had all these Supreme Court justices were left over from the three Republicans there was Harding, coolidge and Hoover in a row that were Republican presidents from, you know, the 1920 onwards, and so there was a lot of like there was a continuity of conservative well, quote, conservative judges. And so he just FDR, said, I'll just pack the court. Well, he even his, you know, supporters in the Senate and the House that were giving him everything else thought that was a bridge too far and it certainly was like he's like I'm not getting the votes I want.
Speaker 2:And if people don't know this, in the Constitution there is no number for Supreme Court justices. So he wasn't necessarily wrong for saying, well, I'm going to just appoint more judges to get the rulings I want. For saying, well, I'm going to just appoint more judges to get the rulings I want. That's the danger, like today, if you just wanted to, if you had the political will. That's why it's so dangerous to give power to the Supreme Court, because you look at your Constitution, there is no number that is appropriate. Like it's just how many? And we've had more than nine at one time, I believe. I mean I think it's gone up to 12 or something during like the 19th century. There's been more and I could be wrong on that number, but it's been more than nine and different than nine. Like I think it's been less at some times. But that whole business plot conspiracy, the fascists are going to take it. I find that to be such that that reeks of false flag.
Speaker 2:And yeah, henry ford's not the kind of guy to overthrow his government he uh, yeah, exactly, and uh, also with fdr.
Speaker 1:It didn't really make too much sense, you know. I mean because fdr was already playing ball. So why would they? Unless he was doing something behind the scenes that we're not privy to, there would be no reason to overthrow FDR because he was playing ball, by all accounts, right. So I tried to look back up. I know he was named before the committee or whatever, but the main one was JP Morgan. So in terms of the financiers, Imagine that.
Speaker 2:No way a banker.
Speaker 3:Need to cross-reference that.
Speaker 2:There's no way.
Speaker 1:You mean a banker, it's hard to believe Two-day talk?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's hard to believe. That doesn't sit well with me. We've got to do more research on this, that's right. Well, Mr Anderson, you got anything else in your copious notes?
Speaker 3:No, I've consumed enough time.
Speaker 2:Well, I looked over on the chat over on Rumble and Birdhouse Blue says that Mr Anderson is on his A game as usual. Absolutely, Bird House Blue says that Mr Anderson is on his A game as usual. I never knew about Fordlandia. Amazing account of one of the biggest car manufacturers.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's funny, I didn't know about it forever. It seems like something you should know about. It's so bizarre and unique unique, I think. The only other thing I'd mentioned about Ford that I really liked was when he was having difficulty really building a name for himself. He realized that one of the ways to bring attention to yourself and your automobile was to show how fast it could go and race it. So he actually built a race car in 1901 called Sweepstakes, and he challenged an American racer named Alexander Winton to a race.
Speaker 3:And up to this point Henry Ford had never raced before and most race cars at the time focused on how powerful the engine was and Henry Ford knew he couldn't compete there, but he could concentrate on making his race car sweepstakes light. So he actually raced against Alexander Winton, who had recently broken the land speed record, and he beat him. He beat him in I think it was an eight lap race and after that he got all sorts of notoriety for doing so and was published in all these newspapers and I just always thought what an interesting and good idea and a little bit crazy. If you've never been in a race car race, Let me challenge one of the best there is in the game. You got to give him some props for that.
Speaker 2:Certainly, chris, you got anything to add before we close out.
Speaker 1:I know that we can tie up the stream in case billy wants to jump, oh yeah no, no, no, just uh it's good to be back and uh thanks everybody for uh continuing to uh support us no, we're glad you're back, brother, and uh, yeah, thanks for supporting chris.
Speaker 2:uh, we'll be back. Next week we're going to do an episode on the Wizard of Oz, the allegory, the weird stuff there. Yeah, there's a ton to unpack. It has it's kind of been my wheelhouse and things I've talked about before on my shows with the monetary system and other things. And of course, l Frank Baum, a contemporary of Lockwood. You know Ingersoll Lockwood, you know the same kind of same kind of stuff. The adventure is a little barren, trump and all this stuff. That's a weird night into the 19th century. All the allegory and stuff We'll get. We'll get into some of that next week.
Speaker 2:Five, 5. Pm central time, 6. Pm Eastern. We'll do pairatrooper Live and then we have other shows planned for this year that are going to be deep dives in long form. We'll do those prerecorded just because we'll have guests and other things. So lots of great material coming out on the channel. Please be sure, and leave us a review, if you can, anywhere that podcasts are found. It does help the algorithms. We're going to put a lot more up on this channel. You also find the Arterburn radio transmission here every week. I put that show up on there as well. So, yeah, share the link. We got great stuff coming out on the show. Mr Anderson, I know you don't want to be found, are you?
Speaker 3:going back to 1999? I'm going to party like it's 1999. It's good.
Speaker 2:Good, because your passport expires on September 11th 2001. So that's right. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we appreciate you. Hope you enjoyed the episode. We will be back next week. If you have ideas for episodes, you want to send us an email? Go through my website. Go to art of burngold If you have ideas for websites or websites. If you have ideas for episodes, I'll take it into consideration for sure. I think we have the next five planned, don't we guys? Yeah?
Speaker 2:I finally took the initiative and said this is what we're going to do on those weeks.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I like the organized approach, and Chris has a good idea on Hunter S Thompson too.
Speaker 2:Yes, we've got a bunch here and we can cover some topical stuff, but it's a. It's kind of a tiny bit of news maybe, but we'll cover that and then we'll give you something to think about. So we appreciate you. Let's see what is our closing out phrase. Mr Anderson, do you remember?
Speaker 3:The information war there you go.
Speaker 2:Oh, he got it, he got it Is that a test.
Speaker 3:See if I'm just walking away.
Speaker 2:I just cut him out of the stream and, just like I, then a Stalin esque move Like whenever it goes to him, it's just a, just, it's a skips to the next guy. Uh, no, we, I know you knew it. Uh, thank you, and yes, and the information will be a pair of truth or we'll see you.