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Who really said it

History is more or less bunk

Spoken by Henry Ford 1863–1947 · American industrialist, founder of the Ford Motor Company
Verified Free to reuse

Ford said it to Chicago Tribune reporter Charles N. Wheeler, in an interview the paper printed on 25 May 1916 — and he owned the word “bunk” under oath at his 1919 libel trial. The wording is genuine; what is not genuine is the three-word slogan “History is bunk,” which is the newspapers’ compression of it.

Last verified 7 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“History is more or less bunk” Henry Ford, interviewed by Charles N. Wheeler, Chicago Tribune, 25 May 1916: "History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition." The popular short form "History is bunk" is a newspaper compression. Verified via quotle.info.

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Evoking the world of Henry Ford — American industrialist & founder of the Ford Motor Company. Theme: "History is more or less bunk". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Provenance

Where it comes from

Publication
Chicago Tribune
Article
“Fight to Disarm His Life and Work, Henry Ford Vows”
Interviewer
Charles N. Wheeler
Date
25 May 1916

I don’t know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across there and I don’t care. I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today. Chicago Tribune, 25 May 1916

Transcriptions of this passage differ slightly. Wikiquote gives the text above; the Journal of Management History quotes the same interview with “a tinker’s dam” and carries it further: “That’s the trouble with the world. We’re living in books and history and tradition. We want to get away from that and take care of today.”

Wikiquote: Henry Ford, sourced quotations

How we checked it

  • Wikiquote ↗ carries the line in its sourced section — not among its disputed or misattributed entries — printing the fuller passage and citing an interview in the Chicago Tribune of 25 May 1916.
  • P. Watt’s peer-reviewed article “Debunking Ford’s relation to the past” ↗ (Journal of Management History, 2021) identifies the source as the fourth and final instalment of a weekly Tribune series of interviews conducted by Charles Wheeler, and cites it in its bibliography as “Fight to disarm his life and work, Henry Ford Vows,” Chicago Tribune, 25th May 1916.
  • The Henry Ford ↗ — the museum Ford founded — states that the Tribune quoted him saying “history is more or less bunk,” and that at the Mt. Clemens trial he replied “I did not say it was bunk. It was bunk to me…”
  • The phrase-origin reference phrases.org.uk ↗ independently gives the same fuller quotation and attributes it to the Chicago Tribune in 1916, though without the exact date or the reporter’s name.
Public domain

The words were first published in the Chicago Tribune of 25 May 1916. Works published in the United States before 1931 are in the public domain, so both the short line and the fuller passage may be quoted freely.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

The name is right. The wording usually isn’t.

This is the rare famous quote where the attribution holds up and the wording is what went wrong. Three things get mangled.

“History is bunk.” compressed

The three-word slogan is the version everyone repeats, but it is not what the Tribune printed. Scholarship following Roger Butterfield’s 1965 essay records that headline writers and editorialists reduced “history is more or less bunk” to the pithy three-word paraphrase, which then became fixed in Ford legend ↗. Confusingly, Ford himself later used the bare form — Wikiquote cites an October 1921 New York Times piece headlined “History is Bunk, Says Henry Ford” ↗.

“a tinker’s damn” vs. “a tinker’s dam” variant

Transcriptions of the same 1916 interview differ on this word: Wikiquote prints “a tinker’s damn” ↗, while the Journal of Management History quotation of the same passage reads “a tinker’s dam” ↗. Neither spelling changes the sense.

The 1919 witness stand misplaced

The remark is often placed at Ford’s libel trial, because that is when it went national. In fact it was printed three years earlier, in the 1916 Tribune interview; the trial is where defence attorneys questioned him about it ↗ and the story exploded.

Ford the anti-history philistine framing

On the stand Ford narrowed the claim rather than repeating it: “I did not say it was bunk. It was bunk to me” ↗. What he rejected was the schoolbook history of kings and generals — not the past itself, as the museum and village he went on to build make plain.

Ford did say it, and the record is clean: the Chicago Tribune printed it on 25 May 1916 ↗. He just said “more or less bunk” — and the qualifier is the whole argument.

Context

Why a throwaway line became a national catchphrase

Ford said it in the middle of a fight about war. In 1916 he was the country’s loudest opponent of the American preparedness movement, and the Chicago Tribune answered with an editorial headlined “Ford Is an Anarchist.” Ford sued for libel. When the case came to trial in 1919 at Mt. Clemens, Michigan, the argument had drifted from whether he was an anarchist to whether he was an ignorant man — so the defence put him on the stand and quizzed him about history. That cross-examination is what pulled a line buried in a 1916 interview onto front pages across the country. Ford technically won: the jury awarded him six cents in damages ↗ against the million dollars he had asked for.

What he actually meant was narrower than the slogan suggests. Ford was not rejecting the past; he was rejecting the schoolbook version of it — kings, generals, dates to be memorised — in favour of the tools and work of ordinary people. In his 1922 book My Life and Work he put the same thought positively: “An educated man is not one whose memory is trained to carry a few dates in history – he is one who can accomplish things” ↗.

I did not say it was bunk. It was bunk to me.

Ford’s own gloss — and the museum he built to answer the charge

Scholarship records that the humiliation of the witness stand is precisely what launched Ford’s career as a collector. He told his secretary Ernst G. Liebold he was going to “give the people an idea of real history” and start a museum showing “just what actually happened in years gone by” — a plan Liebold explicitly connected to the trial (Watt, Journal of Management History, 2021 ↗).

Speaking about Greenfield Village in 1935, Ford drew the line himself: “What they call history IS bunk. Once I went to history books to find out what kind of a harrow people used to cultivate their land. Couldn’t find it. Nothing but kings and battles. That is the kind of history I think is bunk. The real story of humanity is how the people lived and grew” (quoted in Watt, 2021 ↗).

The Edison Institute — the museum complex beside Greenfield Village — opened on 21 October 1929 ↗, dedicated to Thomas Edison at the “Light’s Golden Jubilee” celebration.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Knowledge Time Doubt

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Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Wikiquote: Henry Forden.wikiquote.org

Places the line in the sourced section with the fuller passage, cited to an interview in the Chicago Tribune, 25 May 1916 — plus a separate 1921 New York Times entry for the short “History is bunk” form.
Debunking Ford’s relation to the past (Watt, 2021)eprints.lancs.ac.uk

Peer-reviewed Journal of Management History article; identifies Charles Wheeler’s Tribune interview series, cites the 25 May 1916 article, and traces how headline writers shortened the line.
Origins of The Henry Fordthehenryford.org

The museum Ford founded confirms the Tribune quotation, his Mt. Clemens trial answer — “I did not say it was bunk. It was bunk to me” — and the 1929 opening.
History Is Bunk — meaning & originphrases.org.uk

Phrase-origin reference giving the fuller 1916 Chicago Tribune quotation, though without the exact date or the reporter’s name.
Henry Ford — Quote: “History Is Bunk”science20.com

An amateur 2011 investigation reproducing the 1921 New York Times page carrying the short form, and Henry A. Wise Wood’s May 1916 letter to the Times reporting Ford saying “history is myth.”
Henry Ford (biography)en.wikipedia.org

Life dates (30 July 1863 – 7 April 1947) and the 1919 libel suit against the Chicago Tribune that ended in a six-cent award.

The man who said it

Henry Ford

Henry Ford

1863–1947 · American industrialist & founder of the Ford Motor Company

Henry Ford (1863–1947) founded the Ford Motor Company and pioneered the moving assembly line and the mass-produced, affordable automobile — the system that came to be called Fordism. He was also one of the most talked-about men alive: his Five-Dollar Day, his campaign against American entry into the First World War, and later his antisemitic publishing all kept him in the headlines. The same man who dismissed book history went on to build Greenfield Village, an outdoor museum of almost a hundred relocated historic buildings, to tell the story his own way.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Wheeler, Charles N. “Fight to Disarm His Life and Work, Henry Ford Vows.” Chicago Tribune, 25 May 1916. Cited in P. Watt, “Debunking Ford’s Relation to the Past: History as ‘Bunk’ in Emersonian Perspective,” Journal of Management History 27, no. 4 (2021): 519–536; and in Wikiquote, “Henry Ford” (sourced section).

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘History is more or less bunk’?” Last verified 7 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/history-is-more-or-less-bunk/

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