Page:Literary Digest 1928-01-07 Henry Ford Interview 3.jpg

48The Literary Digest for January 7, 1928 thinks best; for in carrying out the orders of the Engineer of the Universe it is quite impossible to pass the buck." And this brings us to the subject of Mr. Ford's personal traits. Says Mr. Wood:

One kind of criticism makes him angry, as this interviewer inadvertently discovered. Ford denies with heat that his workers are "robots." Thus:

Charles E. Sorensen is commonly spoken of as Ford's "Man Friday," but he is still an indistinct figure to the world at large. It was the first time that Mr. Wood had met him, we are told, and the result was the discovery of a forceful personality. Mr. Wood has no use for the pet formula of Ford's critics—"It isn't Ford, it's Sorensen"—but he goes on to say:

The writer talked with many of Ford's employees, as he had been so warmly admonished to do, and he came away imprest with the fact that such complaints as he heard had nothing whatever to do with the common theory that the machine is making automatons out of the men. Some of them like their jobs, and some don't, he reports, but it is not when the Ford works are going at top speed that they grumble. It is when they shut down, which, we must admit, is not often. Mr. Wood continues: