Dirty Work at Dearborn

Henry Ford, Prohibition's prime industrial protagonist, last week found himself required to explain, reconcile and justify his opinion that the 18th Amendment is "the greatest force for the comfort and prosperity of the U. S." (TIME, March 17)

New York's Wet Congressman Fiorello Henry LaGuardia asked Mr. Ford to fit together two statements. Ford statement No. 1 (in the September Pictorial Review) : "If booze ever comes back to the U. S., I am through with manufacturing. I would not be bothered with the problem of handling over 200,000 men and trying to pay them wages which the saloons would take away from them." Ford statement No. 2 (in the September Forbes Magazine) : "The tractors have already begun to come from Ireland and they are better than we have made here."

Asked Congressman LaGuardia: "How do you justify your factories in Ireland, England, Canada, and Germany where they have no prohibition?"

Retorted Mr. Ford: "We don't allow drinking in any of our foreign factories. That's the trouble with people from New York. They don't think anybody is sober."

To discover what "comfort and prosperity" Prohibition had brought to Dearborn, the huge Ford factory-town outside Detroit, the New York World sent Newsman Kenneth Campbell. Investigator Campbell found speakeasies (known locally as "blind pigs") doing business almost at the factory gates. Fourteen were spotted in one block. Coffee houses and boarding houses sell liquor steadily to Ford workmen, despite the efforts of the Ford secret police to break up 'legger trade.

Mr. Ford, angry at such an investigation, exclaimed: "Do you think I don't know liquor is sold in Dearborn? Of course I know it! It is sold here because the liquor interests are concentrating in this neighborhood because they know I am a dry

. . . . Do you think I don't know who is back of the bootlegging in this country? It is the big money interests in New York. You don't think that the bootleggers could finance these big liquor deals themselves, do you? Everybody wants to show up Henry Ford's town. . . . Why, men bring liquor right into the factory here. I've seen a lot of the bottles that were taken away from them. . . . But do you think a man can work in this factory if he drinks? Well, he can't ! We watch them as they come in. We smell their breaths."

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