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Little Girl
Henry Ford is a historical character, who appears in the book as a compatriot of J. P. Morgan. An American industrialist and entrepreneur, Ford’s pioneering development of the assembly line helped to make automobiles affordable for middle-class Americans at the turn of the 20th century. His business acumen brings him to the attention of Morgan, who is impressed at the innovative way in which Ford turns the process of manufacturing his Model T cars from an endeavor that required skilled labor to something that can be done by an interchangeable series of workers in his Detroit automobile plant. Although Ford agrees with Morgan that they belong to a different—and better—class of humanity than most people, he declines to fully support Morgan’s interest in secret societies and in occult knowledge, preferring to attend to more practical matters. In both life and in the book, Ford expressed virulently antisemitic views.
Henry Ford Quotes in Ragtime
The Ragtime quotes below are all either spoken by Henry Ford or refer to Henry Ford. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 19
Quotes
[Morgan] heard from a native guide of the wisdom given to the great Osiris that there is a sacred tribe of heroes, a colony from the gods who are regularly born in every age to assist mankind. The idea stunned him. The more he thought about it the more palpably he felt it. It was upon his return to America that he began to think about Henry Ford. He had no illusions that Ford was a gentleman. He recognized him for a shrewd provincial, as uneducated as a piece of wood. But he thought he saw in Ford’s use of men a reincarnation of pharaohism. Not only that: he had studied photographs of the automobile manufacturer and had seen an extraordinary resemblance to Seti I, the father of the great Ramses and the best-preserved mummy to have been unearthed from the necropolis of Thebes in the Valley of the Kings.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20
Quotes
Has it occurred to you that your assembly line is not merely a stroke of industrial genius but a projection of organic truth? After all, interchangeability of parts is a rule of nature. Individuals participate in their species and in their genus. All mammals reproduce in the same way and share the same designs of self-nourishment, with digestive and circulatory systems that are recognizably the same, and they enjoy the same senses […] shared design is what allows taxonomists to classify mammals as mammals. And within a species—man, for example—the rules of nature operate so that our individual differences occur on the basis of our similarity. So that individuation may be compared to a pyramid in that it is only achieved by the placement of the top stone.
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Henry Ford Quotes in Ragtime
The Ragtime quotes below are all either spoken by Henry Ford or refer to Henry Ford. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 19
Quotes
[Morgan] heard from a native guide of the wisdom given to the great Osiris that there is a sacred tribe of heroes, a colony from the gods who are regularly born in every age to assist mankind. The idea stunned him. The more he thought about it the more palpably he felt it. It was upon his return to America that he began to think about Henry Ford. He had no illusions that Ford was a gentleman. He recognized him for a shrewd provincial, as uneducated as a piece of wood. But he thought he saw in Ford’s use of men a reincarnation of pharaohism. Not only that: he had studied photographs of the automobile manufacturer and had seen an extraordinary resemblance to Seti I, the father of the great Ramses and the best-preserved mummy to have been unearthed from the necropolis of Thebes in the Valley of the Kings.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20
Quotes
Has it occurred to you that your assembly line is not merely a stroke of industrial genius but a projection of organic truth? After all, interchangeability of parts is a rule of nature. Individuals participate in their species and in their genus. All mammals reproduce in the same way and share the same designs of self-nourishment, with digestive and circulatory systems that are recognizably the same, and they enjoy the same senses […] shared design is what allows taxonomists to classify mammals as mammals. And within a species—man, for example—the rules of nature operate so that our individual differences occur on the basis of our similarity. So that individuation may be compared to a pyramid in that it is only achieved by the placement of the top stone.
