My current reading is this book, which is a fascinating history of something I never knew about.
Henry Ford was a damn good pacifist who said all the right things about how industry and trade were the future of human cooperation and progress. And how war took us backward. He had plenty of flaws (including his major anti-Semitism), but he got this stuff right, at least before the 1920s.
Teddy Roosevelt was not just another Progressive who never saw a regulation he didn't like, he was also a war-mongering, nationalist, piece of crap.
Reading this book on Ford has me thinking about Hoover and the high-wage policy that was a major contributing factor to the depth of the Great Depression. One of the interesting historical questions is why so many industrialists went along with Hoover's "request" that they not cut nominal wages starting in late 1929, even as prices were falling.
Hoover believed that high wages created spending power, and this sort of consumer spending drove economic growth. We can, to use a Misesian word, explode the fallacies of this view all day long, but why would the industrialists buy it, given that they presumably understood the effects on their bottom line?
One theory is that they just didn't want to contradict a president who was clearly willing to use more than the bully pulpit if necessary. Another is that they saw this concession as one that would ward off the bigger threat from unions and the socialist left.
But reading this book... what I didn't know about Ford was that he combined his $5/day wage with a broader conception of how it played into the economy. Yes, it would help Ford workers buy Ford cars, but he also believed that it had the same sort of macroeconomic benefits that Hoover did. Ford had a political-economic vision and paying high wages was a way to both ensure long-run growth and avoid short-run fluctuations. Ford should be seen as part of the group of public intellectuals and influencers (as opposed to professional economists) who saw the high-wage policy as good macro (e.g. Foster and Catchings among others). "Fordism" wasn't just about factory efficiency, like Taylorism was. It was bigger and broader than that just that.
And then if you consider just how worshipped Ford was at the time for his innovative thinking across a number of areas, and for the wealth he had created and the lives he had changed, it's not surprising perhaps that other industrialists would have been influenced by his ideas as well. Perhaps one reason why so many went along with it by the late 20s was that they bought into "Fordism" lock, stock, and barrel.