Henry Jones Ford (August 25, 1851 – August 29, 1925) was an American political scientist, journalist, university professor, and government official. He served as president of the American Political Science Association. He was appointed by Woodrow Wilson as the Banking and Insurance Commissioner of New Jersey in 1912.
Ford worked as a managing editor and editorial writer from 1872 to 1905, at six different newspapers in three cities Baltimore, New York City, and Pittsburgh.
Later returning to Baltimore, Ford taught at Johns Hopkins University, and afterwards taught at the University of Pennsylvania. Known to say that politics was a "dirty business" unsuitable for women, his students at Penn included suffragist Alice Paul, whose experiences in his classes informed her decision to pursue master's and doctoral degrees in sociology instead of politics. Ford later took a job as professor of politics at Princeton University, at the request of the university's then-president, Woodrow Wilson.
Quote
"The constitutional ideal is noble; but the politicians are vile. If only the checks could be made more effective, if only a just balance of power could be established beyond the strength of the politicians to disarrange ... the constitution would work perfectly."
Selected works
The works marked with (e-book) are freely available from Project Gutenberg:
- The Rise and Growth of American Politics: A Sketch of Constitutional Development (1898)
- The Cost of Our National Government: A Study in Political Pathology (1910)
- The Natural History of the State: An Introduction to Political Science (1915)
- The Scotch-Irish in America (1915; )
- Woodrow Wilson, the Man and His Work: A Biographical Study (1916)
- Washington and His Colleagues: A Chronicle of the Rise and Fall of Federalism (1918; ; e-book)
- The Cleveland Era: A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics (1918; ; e-book)
- Alexander Hamilton (1920)
- Representative Government (1924)