December 1980 | Volume 32, Issue 1 What happened when the
richest man in America decided to collect one of everything The
whole curious enterprise puzzled Americans in the 1920’s. Here
was mighty Henry Ford, the man who said history was “more or
less bunk,” collecting on a titanic scale every jot and tittle
of the American past that he and his emissaries could lay hands
on—four-poster beds, banjo clocks, cigar-store Indians, old
boots, gas lamps, rusty old threshers, and wooden flails. Here
was the near legendary “Motor King,” who once told the press
that he wanted only to “live in the Now,” conducting visitors to
his family homestead in Dearborn and showing them, with a soft
gleam in his eyes, how he had restored it to the way it had
looked in 1876 when he was a thirteen-year-old schoolboy. Here
was the “father of mass production” collecting old stagecoach
stops, rude machine shops, antique bicycles, and Conestoga
wagons. “It is,” said The New York Times , “as if Stalin went in
for collecting old ledgers and