ADVICE TO THE UNEMPLOYED IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION (11 June 1932, by Henry Ford)

The decade before the Great Depression was one of unprecedented economic growth. The rise of new industries, such as automobile manufacturing, created jobs and newfound prosperity for working and middle-class American families. Automobile industry giant Henry Ford (1863–1947), whose company, Ford Motor Company, designed and implemented the first continuously moving assembly line, was a prominent leader in the new industrial order.

The stock market crash of 1929 and the deepening post-war economic crisis overseas devastated the rapidly growing American economy, however, and many industrial workers were forced out of their jobs. Ford regarded himself as a groundbreaking advocate for fair labor management policies, such as the institution, in 1914, of an eight-hour workday, and saw himself as a champion of economic independence. In light of these beliefs, in this passage Ford urged the unemployed not to depend upon benefactors or charity for their survival. Hard, self-directed work, he believed, will keep the worker profitably employed until the economic situation turns around.

Leah R. Shafer,
Cornell University

See also Great Depression ; Unemployment .

I have always had to work, whether anyone hired me or not. For the first forty years of my life, I was an employee. When not employed by others, I employed myself. I found very early that being out of hire was not necessarily being out of work. The first means that your employer has not found something for you to do; the second means that you are waiting until he does.

We nowadays think of work as something others find for us to do, call us to do, and pay us to do. No doubt our industrial growth is largely responsible for that. We have accustomed men to think of work that way.

In my own case, I was able to find work for others as well as myself. Outside my family life, nothing has given me more satisfaction than to see jobs increase in number and in profit to the men who handle them. And, beyond question, the jobs of the world today are more numerous and profitable in wages than they were even eighteen year ago.

But something entirely outside the workshops of the nation has affected this hired employment very seriously. The word "unemployment" has become one of the most dreadful words in the language. The condition itself has become the concern of every person in the country.

When this condition arrived, there were just three things to be done. The first, of course, was to maintain employment at the maximum by every means known to management. Employment—hire—was what the people were accustomed to; they preferred it; it was the immediate solution of the difficulty. In our plants we used every expedient to spread as much employment over as many employees as was possible. I don't believe in "make work"—the public pays for all unnecessary work—but there are times when the plight of others compels us to do the human thing even though it be but a makeshift; and I am obliged to admit that, like most manufacturers, we avoided layoffs by continuing work that good business judgment would have halted. All of our nonprofit work was continued in full force and much of the shop work. There were always tens of thousands employed—the lowest point at Dearborn was 40,000—but there were always thousands unemployed or so meagerly employed that the situation was far from desirable.

When all possible devices for providing employment have been used and fall short, there remains no alternative but self-help or charity.

I do not believe in routine charity. I think it a shameful thing that any man should have to stoop to take it, or give it. I do not include human helpfulness under the name of charity. My quarrel with charity is that it is neither helpful nor human. The charity of our cities is the most barbarous thing in our system, with the possible exception of our prisons. What we call charity is a modern substitute for being personally kind, personally concerned, and personally involved in the work of helping others in difficulty. True charity is a much more costly effort than money-giving. Our donations too often purchase exemption from giving the only form of help that will drive the need for charity out of the land.

Our own theory of helping people has been in operation for some years. We used to discuss it years ago—when no one could be persuaded to listen. Those who asked public attention to these matters were ridiculed by the very people who now call most loudly for someone to do something.

Our own work involves the usual emergency relief, hospitalization, adjustment of debt, with this addition—we help people to alter their affairs in commonsense accordance with changed conditions, and we have an understanding that all help received should be repaid in reasonable amounts in better times. Many families were not so badly off as they thought; they needed guidance in the management of their resources and opportunities. Human nature, of course, presented the usual problems. Relying on human sympathy many develop a spirit of professional indigence. But where cooperation is given, honest and self-respecting persons and families can usually be assisted to a condition which is much less distressing than they feared.

One of our responsibilities, voluntarily assumed—not because it was ours but because there seemed to be no one else to assume it—was the care of a village of several hundred families whose condition was pretty low. Ordinarily, a large welfare fund would have been needed to accomplish anything for these people. In this instance, we set the people at work cleaning up their homes and backyards, and then cleaning up the roads of their town, and then plowing up about 500 acres of vacant land around their houses. We abolished everything that savored of "handout" charity, opening instead a modern commissary where personal I O U's were accepted, and a garment-making school, and setting the cobblers and tailors of the community to work for their neighbors. We found the people heavily burdened with debt, and we acted informally as their agents in apportioning their income to straighten their affairs. Many families are now out of debt for the first time in years. There has appeared in this village, not only a new spirit of confidence in life but also a new sense of economic values and an appreciation of economic independence which we feel will not soon be lost.

None of these things could have been accomplished by paying out welfare funds after the orthodox manner. The only true charity for these people was somehow to get under their burdens with them and lend them the value of our experience to show them what can be done by people in their circumstances.

Our visiting staff in city work has personally handled thousands of cases in the manner above described. And while no institution can shoulder all the burden, we feel that merely to mitigate present distress is not enough—we feel that thousands of families have been prepared for a better way of life when the wheels of activity begin turning again.

But there is still another way, a third way, so much better than the very best charitable endeavor that it simply forbids us to be satisfied with anything less. That is the way of Self-Help.

SOURCE: Ford, Henry. "On Unemployment." Literary Digest (11–18 June 1932).