"Whoopee!"

Next to the New York Stock Exchange, Henry Ford gets more free publicity than any other business institution in the land. All he has to do is to open his mouth and utter a few simple words and the familiar headline FORD SAYS blossoms forth on the front page of the U. S. Press. With the 1934 automobile season dead but not yet buried, the spare, grey-haired Man of Dearborn was again last week the envy of U. S. tycoons when he called in newshawks and announced that next year, for the first time since 1930, his company was going to turn out 1,000,000 Fords.

"Make it a million or better," he added. "Our experience during the last six months and what we see in the future tell us that a year of improved business is ahead."

For this year Mr. Ford planned a production of 600,000 units but sales so far have topped 700,000. Chevrolet, having overcome its early handicap caused by a tool & diemakers' strike, is now leading the traditional race for title of "fastest selling car in the U. S." with an output of nearly 800,000 cars in the first ten months, but Henry Ford knows only too well the advantage of a flying start into a new year. Last week his great plants were shut down for retooling and his branch managers were assembled in Dearborn to plot their 1935 plans.

Henry Ford is one of the few U. S. businessmen who has never suffered from New Deal jitters.* The man who has built 22,000,000 automobiles in 30 years regards the Roosevelt Administration's policies, or lack of them, as superficially annoying but hardly worth a busy man's attention. Said he last week:

"Why, the Depression would be over for the whole country very soon if American industrialists would just forget these alphabet schemes and take hold of their industries and run them with good, sound American business sense. They should take hold of their country, too, in the same way and run it with good, sound American common sense."

And laying his money on the line, he declared that his 1935 program called for expenditures of no less than $415,000,000. Though rushing expansion of his own steel plants (TIME, Sept. 10), he will buy $53,600,000 of steel in the open market. Tires will cost $22,500,000. Freight bills for hauling Ford supplies from 6,008 widely scattered concerns will foot up to $74,000,000. Biggest item in the Ford budget is $100,000,000 for bodies from outside builders. Full production schedules, to be resumed next month, will require 87,000 men.

News of Mr. Ford's 1935 plans sent a warm thrill of satisfaction through Washington. President Roosevelt was "gratified." Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, when newshawks gave him the florid details, cried with delight: "Whoopee!"

*Partly because he had a private depression in 1927-28 when Model T was scrapped.

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