Driving somewhere away from your McHenry home to celebrate Thanksgiving this year? Maybe you’re staying home and laying out your own Thanksgiving spread. Whatever the case, you’re going to depend on the assistance of the automobile.

If you’re taking an airplane to a faraway destination, you’ll still need a car. You’ll need a car if you hire a cab, Uber or limousine to drive you to the airport. If you take the train to the airport, you’ll probably need a car to get to the train station. But what if you’re staying home?

How are the ingredients for your Thanksgiving dinner going to make their way to your pantry and refrigerator if not for a car. Even if you call DoorDash and have the food delivered, they’re going to use a car. Only a remotely small number of people will walk to and from the grocery store to pickup the turkey and fixings for this special meal.

However, even for someone who does walk to and from the grocery store, if not for trucks that are closely related to the automobile most of us have in our McHenry driveway, the food would have a tough time getting to the grocery store in the first place.

What this all comes down to is that we owe a bunch to the automobile. Not just on Thanksgiving but all year round, the automobile provides mobility that has impacted our lives in more ways than we realize. And widespread access to the automobile goes back to one man.

Henry Ford not only built inexpensive automobiles, he invented the assembly line. It was the assembly line that gave Ford the ability to reduce the cost of an automobile so that it was attainable by the average person.

Henry Ford was not a perfect person. He is easily described as a bigot and a racist. But he had a genius for things mechanical. And, in spite of his flaws, he was also known as a philanthropist. 

You can knock Ford, if you’d like, but there’s no denying that, and not merely in relation to the automobile, Ford made mass production possible. Mass production meant that everything we use is no longer custom built. And one thing about ‘Custom Built’ is that it’s expensive. Mass production, as applied to the laws of supply and demand, brings the cost of items down.

There are thousands of flatscreen televisions. Therefore, most of us can afford one (or two, or three). The same applied to cars. With Ford’s assembly line, the supply of automobiles were sufficient to effect the cost. Without the assembly line, far fewer of us would own a car. And the two-car family would be unthinkable for anyone with a modest income.

As explained in Wikipedia, “Ford was a pioneer of ‘welfare capitalism,’ designed to improve the lot of his workers …” Those workers, over the decades, were mostly very thankful for Henry Ford.

If we think about over our meals on this coming Thanksgiving Day in McHenry, we have plenty of reason to be thankful for Henry Ford, too.