The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

Wasteful Transportation in Agriculture
The following material challenges the merits of food distribution systems 
that may spend more on transportation than on actual production. Ford 
cites the example of the shipment of steers from Texas to Chicago stock-
yards to be processed into beef for consumption in Boston.
There is an obvious extra cost to the shipment of foods that consist 
primarily of water. Most fruits and vegetables are in fact more than 80% 
water by weight. The “Henry Ford thought process,” therefore, would 
ask whether they should be produced in greenhouses relatively close 
to where they are to be eaten despite the up-front capital cost of the 
greenhouses.
* * *
And then, perhaps, we shall witness a revival of the small flour-milling busi-
ness. It was an evil day when the village flour mill disappeared. Cooperative 
farming will become so developed that we shall see associations of farmers 
with their own packing houses in which their own hogs will be turned into 
ham and bacon, and with their own flour mills in which their grain will be 
turned into commercial foodstuffs.
Why a steer raised in Texas should be brought to Chicago and then 
served in Boston is a question that cannot be answered as long as all 
the steers the city needs could be raised near Boston. The centraliza-
tion of food manufacturing industries, entailing enormous costs for 

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186  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
transportation and organization, is too wasteful[ly] long to continue in a 
developed community.
We shall have as great a development in farming during the next twenty 
years as we have had in manufacturing during the last twenty.

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187
15
Why Charity?
This chapter challenges the fundamental concept of philanthropy, and it 
does so very credibly. Ford did not object to charity for immediate needs 
(such as food for people who would otherwise starve in the streets), but 
his goal was to make charity unnecessary. His industries eradicated most 
poverty from the communities in which they appeared, which again 
makes his principles proven methods as opposed to mere theories.
Ford’s condemnation of traditional charity also applies to the failure of 
Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Programs that address the immedi-
ate symptoms of poverty, but fail to address its underlying causes, foster 
a “state of expectant, child-like helplessness” among their beneficiaries. 
Ford reminds his readers that people with physical disabilities could fill 
many jobs in his factories, and perform them every bit as well as people 
with no physical impairments.
* * *
Why should there be any necessity for almsgiving in a civilized community? 
It is not the charitable mind to which I object. Heaven forbid that we should 
ever grow cold toward a fellow creature in need. Human sympathy is too fine 
for the cool, calculating attitude to take its place. One can name very few 
great advances that did not have human sympathy behind them. It is in order 
to help people that every notable service is undertaken.
The trouble is that we have been using this great, fine motive force for ends 
too small. If human sympathy prompts us to feed the hungry, why should it 
not give the larger desire—to make hunger in our midst impossible? If we 
have sympathy enough for people to help them out of their troubles, surely we 
ought to have sympathy enough to keep them out.
It is easy to give; it is harder to make giving unnecessary. To make the 
giving unnecessary we must look beyond the individual to the cause of his 
misery—not hesitating, of course, to relieve him in the meantime, but not 
stopping with mere temporary relief. The difficulty seems to be in getting to 

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188  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
look beyond to the causes. More people can be moved to help a poor fam-
ily than can be moved to give their minds toward the removal of poverty 
altogether.
I have no patience with professional charity, or with any sort of commer-
cialized humanitarianism. The moment human helpfulness is systematized, 
organized, commercialized, and professionalized, the heart of it is extin-
guished, and it becomes a cold and clammy thing.
Real human helpfulness is never card-catalogued or advertised. There are 
more orphan children being cared for in the private homes of people who 
love them than in the institutions. There are more old people being sheltered 
by friends than you can find in the old people’s homes. There is more aid by 
loans from family to family than by the loan societies. That is, human society 
on a humane basis looks out for itself. It is a grave question how far we ought 
to countenance the commercialization of the natural instinct of charity.
Professional charity is not only cold but it hurts more than it helps. It 
degrades the recipients and drugs their self-respect. Akin to it is sentimental 
idealism. The idea went abroad not so many years ago that “service” was 
something that we should expect to have done for us. Untold numbers of 
people became the recipients of well-meant “social service.” Whole sections 
of our population were coddled into a state of expectant, child-like helpless-
ness. There grew up a regular profession of doing things for people, which 
gave an outlet for a laudable desire for service, but which contributed noth-
ing whatever to the self-reliance of the people nor to the correction of the 
conditions out of which the supposed need for such service grew.
Worse than this encouragement of childish wistfulness, instead of training 
for self-reliance and self-sufficiency, was the creation of a feeling of resent-
ment which nearly always overtakes the objects of charity. People often com-
plain of the “ingratitude” of those whom they help. Nothing is more natural. 
In the first place, precious little of our so-called charity is ever real charity, 
offered out of a heart full of interest and sympathy. In the second place, no 
person ever relishes being in a position where he is forced to take favors.
Such “social work” creates a strained relation—the recipient of bounty 
feels that he has been belittled in the taking, and it is a question whether 
the giver should not also feel that he has been belittled in the giving. Charity 
never led to a settled state of affairs. The charitable system that does not aim 
to make itself unnecessary is not performing service. It is simply making a job 
for itself and is an added item to the record of non-production.

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Why Charity?  •  189