An Unlikely Bond: Henry Ford and Mohandas Gandhi

People like Henry Ford, a wealthy industrialist and a famous inventor, are more likely to receive fan letters than to write them, but Ford did write at least one. In July 1941, he wrote a letter to Mohandas Gandhi, expressing his admiration for Gandhi’s work.

The letter took two months to reach Gandhi. Mail from Detroit to India was slowed by WW2.

When Ford wrote the letter, the United States had not yet entered the war. By the time Gandhi received the letter, President Roosevelt was delivering a speech to Congress, and war was declared on December 8, 1941, the day Gandhi got Ford’s correspondence.

But Henry Ford hadn’t written about the war. He was merely expressing his admiration for Gandhi’s work.

One link between Ford and Gandhi was that both men had a thorough understanding of industrial processes and economics. Gandhi’s political work in India was carried out by the concrete process of forming thread on a spinning wheel and by the process of deriving table salt from evaporating seawater.

Both men understood the economic, social, and political impacts of such mechanical processes.

In response to Ford’s letter, Gandhi sent him a spinning wheel, which Ford displayed in his museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The spinning wheel is still there.

Social Class Structure in Mexico in the Early 19th Century

At the beginning of the 1800s, a system of social classes structured Mexican society, politics, and economics. At the top were the criollos, colonists born in Mexico to European parents. Along with the criollos were the European settlers themselves, who, however, by this time were few in number.

The fragmentation of Mexican society extended to subgroups within the major groups. The criollos, e.g., were divided among themselves regarding how far suffrage should extend.

Further down were the Indians, the Native Americans living in Mexico. The imperial government in Spain guaranteed them certain conditions, that they would have specified lands and be given a certain immunity from the colonial government.

The Spanish government didn’t do this out of the purest altruism: by stabilizing the Indians and giving them an at least minimal status, the imperial government in Spain hoped to create a roadblock to the increasing ambitions of the criollos, who wanted increasing influence in the colonial administration, and eventually independence.

The Spanish clergy worked toward the same goals as the Spanish imperial government, but with contrasting motives. As one history textbook, World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal-Littell, 2007), notes, “Spanish priests worked” in Mexico “for better treatment of Native Americans.”

Mexican society included a spectrum of other social classes, based on race, ethnicity, and culture: mestizos and zambos and about a half-dozen more.

But by the 1820s, the Mexicans succeeded in gaining independence from Spain. The social classes were now seen as classes of citizenship. Starting in Mexico City after the revolution, the right to vote was clearly defined and limited to certain demographic groups. As historian Irving Levinson writes,

By 1846, this pattern of exclusion applied to the entire nation. In that year, the federal government promulgated election regulations limiting suffrage to members of eight groups: land owners, mine owners and operators, military officers, clergy, magistrates, manufacturers, and members of learned professions. For some of these categories, such as that of landowner, the state also set minimum income requirements. By definition, owners of small farms and ranches, rural laborers, industrial workers, common tradespersons, and mine workers could not vote, let alone run for office.

The politics of Mexico, as a newly-independent nation, became the politics of class warfare.

As this class system asserted itself in the first two decades after Mexico gained its independence, it weakened Mexican society. Levinson continues:

In 1846, deep and violent disputes whose origins lay in the country’s colonial past divided Mexico. The first and most important of these chasms lay along lines of ethnicity and race.

Mexico’s internal social divisions would cause it to lose its first major war, and cause a major change among the political factions. The fissures in Mexican society prevented unified support for Mexico’s war efforts. The war is linked to a significant shift in Mexican partisan politics. The new postwar partisan trends led to an era known as “La Reforma” in Mexican history.