Politics proverbially makes strange bedfellows, seldom unlikelier than those that gathered around the idealistic mission known as the Peace Ship. Thomas Edison and William Jennings Bryan supported the vision, but Henry Ford underwrote the voyage. Although he would later become a notorious purveyor of anti-Semitism, in 1915 Ford allied himself with Rosika Schwimmer, a Hungarian Jewish journalist and suffragist active in the Woman’s Peace Party. She had traveled with Jane Addams to The Hague in the spring of 1915 and now sought to return to Europe and establish a Conference for Continuous Mediation between the belligerent governments. Ford chartered an ocean liner that sailed for Scandinavia from Hoboken, New Jersey, on December 4, 1915, carrying himself, Schwimmer, a large delegation of peace activists, and a host of journalists. George Riis of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle sent this dispatch from Kirkwall, the port in the Orkneys where the British cleared neutral ships seeking to enter the North Sea. Ford fell ill in Norway and left the delegation on December 23. Upon returning to the United States, he said that while he “didn’t get much peace” on the voyage, he was encouraged to hear “that Russia might well become a huge market for tractors.” The remaining delegates made no progress in ending the war.
ON BOARD STEAMSHIP OSCAR II, December 15—A band played, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” It was a Danish band, too. With the first strains the Henry Ford peace pilgrims tumbled from a cold couch—pilgriming for peace up near the outer edge of the Arctic Circle is no joke—and prepared to take stock of one another. There they were and it was too late to get off the boat—peace-at-any-price men, single-taxers, Socialists, suffragists and vegetarians. All differences were breached in the unity of one great common cause, for whether they believed in eating grass for breakfast or in the affinity of molecules, they were all determined to stop the war.
This is, indeed, a strange assortment of men and women. They haven’t anything except a vague idea of why they are going—that is, so far as details are concerned—but they are on their way. All they know is that Henry Ford and Mme. Schwimmer are going to do something, somehow, to bring about peace and they are going to help. One hundred and sixty-five men and women will present a solid phalanx against Europe in arms. Three days in Norway, three in Sweden, a similar length of time in Copenhagen, a few conferences at The Hague ending with the appointment of a handful of permanent delegates, and all will be settled.
A zealot from Hungary, in whose breast there burned a consuming hatred of war, found a dreamer, a supreme idealist, in America whose dream was that some day universal brotherhood would reign among the peoples of the earth, engines of war become scrap iron, and swords be beaten into plowshares. The dreamer had great wealth and a dream. The zealot had something more than a dream—a definite plan. For months she had been looking for a man with money to back the plan and she had found him.
The two chartered a steamship—or, to be more correct—bought the first and second cabins, gathered about them a little circle of men and women who had been prominent in work for peace, and with 165 laymen and women, most of them idealists like themselves, set out on what in many respects is the most remarkable cruise in history. They went away to bring a world at arms to its senses as confidently as if they were merely on a Sunday school excursion to Rockaway and expected to return before dark.
That is how the unique voyage of Henry Ford, manufacturer, and one of the world’s richest men, and Mme. Rosika Schwimmer, Hungarian suffragist and peace lecturer, shapes itself. Jason Ford is after the Golden Fleece. Will he get it?
PARTY DOESN’T REPRESENT ANYTHING IN PARTICULAR.
The 165 are representative of nobody in particular, unless you except the college students. Although they are on their way to a continent where preparedness has been a cardinal virtue many of them have joined the ship in such a hurry that they have lost trunks and grips in their haste. One woman came from Philadelphia via taxicab to Newark with a set of handkerchiefs and a spare shirtwaist, but no heavy coat. She was on her way to Norway, which is not a long way from the Arctic Circle, and where the snow will be lying on the mountains when we get there. Others, like Senator Helen Ring Robinson of Colorado, have had to abandon missing trunks in the wild chase for a ship. This chase to bring Europe to her senses reminds one, in lost impedimenta at any rate, of an army’s flight.
One cannot laugh at their earnestness, however. It is pathetic in some instances. There are those among them who appear to believe that if a hand is held up to fighting Europe the cannons roar will end and the chimes of peace ring out over a glad world.
A strange, impractical lot for the most part. Visionary among visionaries—the cream of the idealists of America. Stop and ask many of them just how they mean to go about settling the war and you discover that they have their heads in the clouds. They haven’t any real plan; they are trusting to Henry Ford, Mme. Schwimmer, Louis Lochner, Dr. Aked and old Dr. Jenkin Lloyd Jones of Chicago, to lead them out of the wilderness of conflict into a land where no one carries a big stick but all speak softly. There are to be no more warships, no more guns—the nations will settle all their quarrels in a World Court of Arbitration or something. Really, we haven’t thought out the details, you know.
FORD’S IDEAS HAVE BEEN MISINTERPRETED AT HOME.
Ford is sincere. There is not the slightest doubt of that. He has done many remarkable things when people ridiculed him and he is convinced that he can succeed in this, the greatest thing he ever attempted. Ford has been misinterpreted at home.
This may be due to the fact that he shows up poorly in an interview. He doesn’t talk. He failed to answer questions well. To listen to him, you would set him down as the most impractical of men when it comes to a mission such as this, whatever he may be in his business.
The cruise of “Henry the Dreamer” is based upon faith. That is the only large asset he gives this expedition besides his money. He is ready to spend every last cent of his huge fortune to back up his faith. He has the nerve of a gambler stacking his all on the last card. They say he has more ready money available than any other man in America—about $95,000,000 in assets which he could convert into cash quickly—and he owes nothing.
There does not seem reasonable room for the belief that Ford is trying to advertise himself. His income is said to be $50,000 a day. Wherefore advertise himself, say his friends.
Such a cosmopolitan company it is—a Governor, a Lieutenant Governor, a judge, educators, a dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, now head of the sociological department of the Ford works—a fine, level-headed man—a group of college students from West, South and East, a sprinkling of single-taxers and Socialists and more than fifty newspapermen and women and magazine writers.
Mixed in with the visionaries there is an element of men and women who do not go so far as advocating sweeping disarmament, a subject dear to the heart of Lochner and Mme. Schwimmer, but joined because they are more than half convinced that some good may be accomplished by a trip which all the world is ridiculing. Judge Lindsey is one of these and so is Governor Hanna of North Dakota. Dean Marquis of St. Paul’s Cathedral, a long-time friend of Ford’s, and Lieutenant Governor Bethea of South Carolina.
FORD SINCERE IN HIS BELIEF HE CAN STOP THE WAR.
They know that Ford is sincere, they are his friends and want to stand by him when a world ridicules, and they are hypnotized by that abiding faith of his in human nature which nothing has succeeded in shaking yet. He is an optimist of first water.
“I believe there are very few bad men in this world,” said Ford to an Eagle correspondent. “I believe that if you follow a man with your human sympathy you can bring out the good that is in him and it is surely there in every man. I have many men working for me who have been in prison and out of 600 such cases that I have handled I have only known of three men who failed to live up to my expectations.”
But he talks vaguely of adopting his idea of “community spirit” in Europe. He says at one minute that it may be necessary for the country to have a modified form of protection—citizen police—perhaps—and the next moment he talks uncompromisingly of universal disarmament. He tells you that the greatest thing said in this war was the statement of Lord Rosebery that he was sorry to see the United States arming against that which Great Britain is trying to crush out. He declares that the world war had its roots laid away back in Napoleon’s time and that the Kaiser has it in him to be the greatest man of all time. One cannot get away from the idea that Henry Ford, as a peace apostle, is a fine manufacturer.
He talks about world politics like a little child. One feels sorry for the man while one admires his sublime audacity in setting sail across the wintry seas to set a world askew back in the straight path again by the power of his personality and the potent force of his money.
An honest man with a dream. That is a correct interpretation of Ford. Did ever crusader launch a bolder enterprise under more untoward circumstances?
The Daily Brooklyn Eagle, January 6, 1916