Ford Work, for 10 Brass Instruments and Recitation
Duration: 1:30
Completed: 2007
Instrumentation: Cornet, 2 Trumpets, 4 Trombones, 2 Horns, Tuba, and Backstage recitation
Program Notes
In the Twentieth Century, people toiled in the Ford Corporation and Ford Werke of Germany under poor conditions, such that wives would write Henry Ford and beg him to let their husbands go to the bathroom at some point during the day. In the brave new world of the United States, we seem to memorialize Ford for stretching people’s bladders so far while constructing our machines of war and pollution, such that a 1999 Gallup Poll found that eighty-five percent of respondents admired Henry Ford.
After hours, Ford produced a newspaper called “The Dearborn Independent” that exposed many to some of the most infamous anti-Semitic screeds “the Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem”, which many National Socialists regarded as an inspiration for their demonizing and hate-mongering tactics. While campaigning in Germany in the Nineteen Twenties and Thirties, Adolf Hitler kept a portrait of Ford above his desk and told a reporter that “[w]e look on Heinrich Ford as the leader of a growing Fascisti movement in America… We have just had his anti-Jewish articles translated and published. The book [The International Jew] is being circulated to millions throughout Germany.” The Dearborn Independent also was a rallying place for the ideas of the 20th Century Ku Klux Klan. Ford would personally act to cause the Ford Corporation to refuse contracts to The Allies, in particular the British, during World War II, and had a personal involvement in ensuring that Nazi Germany was supplied with troop transports through Ford Werke.
Furthermore, the Ford Corporation has by no means entirely disavowed its past, but rather has been dodging paying the war reparations that it owes people for their time in forced labor at Ford Werke, which, according to the Ford Corporation’s own records, the Dearborn headquarters knew about, approved of, and from which they made great profits. As one of Ford Werke’s victims, Elsa Iwanowa, stated “I think they’re waiting for us all to die, so they won’t have to pay us.”
It is no wonder that Ford would be admired with a proxy organization looking after his name. For example, the “Ford Made in America” project commissions works in praise of the Ford Corporation (all these works will bear the “Ford Made in America” label. Joan Tower’s work is even titled “Made in America”). This work is a protestation about that state of affairs and a little effacement Ford’s memory. It is exactly the length of a really long piss on Henry Ford’s grave (one that one of the old school Ford Corporation workers with the most grossly enlarged bladders might piss). As such, it is ephemeral, but even this small outcry has been very difficult to realize! I encourage you to boycott the Ford Corporation until they pay the war reparations that they owe, and to spill a little urine of Ford’s grave if you get the chance.
“Heinrich Ford Idol of Bavaria Fascisti Chief” Chicago Tribune, March 8 1923, P. 2.
