Fordlandia (12 page)

The man who once repudiated tradition and declared himself the executor of the modern world was having published under his byline in the
Dearborn Independent
articles that denounced “change,” which he warned was “not always progress.” “The trouble with us today is that we have been unfaithful to the White Man’s traditions and privileges,” one article said. Having thrown open his factory gates to workers from across the world and declared that he didn’t like borders of any kind, he now looked warily at Ellis Island, with its “horde of people who have been systematically beforehand taught that the United States is a ‘capitalistic country,’ not to be enjoyed but to be destroyed.” Ford would continue to condemn war and those who profited from it, yet the man who once scolded Theodore Roosevelt for his antiquated militarism now cautioned his “race” that it needed to maintain “unrelenting vigilance” against two threats: one was a “corrupt orientalism” that was “breaking down the rugged directness of the White Man’s Code,” the other a “false cry of ‘Peace, Peace’ when there is no peace.”
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BEYOND THE PROBLEMS and abuses that Ford himself couldn’t solve, created, aggravated, or compromised on—depressed agricultural prices, labor violence, anti-Semitism, the dehumanization of machine work, and war—it became apparent throughout the 1920s that both his car and his factory system worked against the world he hoped to bring into being.

Ford imagined his method as a powerful integrator: the rational application of technology would allow for the holistic development of industry and agriculture; the tractor and other advances in mechanization would relieve the drudgery of field and barn, the car and truck would knit regional markets closer together, providing new sources of income for hard-strapped farmers; radios and telephones would overcome rural isolation (starting in the 1930s, Ford broadcast from a company studio in Dearborn his
Sunday Evening Hour
, which featured “familiar music, majestically rendered,” as well as editorials reflecting the “philosophic views of the Founder”); and grounding it all was a faith in the alchemic power of high wages to create prosperous, healthy working-class communities, with private profit dependent on the continual expansion of consumer markets. “Our buying class is our working class,” Ford said clearly and simply, and “our working class must become our ‘leisure class’ if our immense production is to be balanced by consumption.” At his most eccentric, Ford insisted that the fulfillment of this vision would result in a restoration of small-town America.
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But Fordism, and the product it was first associated with, was also a potent dissolving agent.
*
The car transmuted sexual mores and loosened the bonds between men and women, children and parents. It alleviated the burden of farmwork and brought points on the map closer together, yet the automobile also began the transformation of human settlements and migration patterns, broadening the social horizon of people’s lives. Daily commutes grew longer, and families spread out. The extension of paved highways, the widening of existing thoroughfares, and the sprawl of industrialized metropolises were visible threats to the rural communities so treasured by Ford as the repository of American virtue. By 1920, the county Ford’s wife grew up in, Greenfield Township, was absorbed by Detroit, and later in the decade he had to move his childhood home to save it from destruction due to the planned expansion of a county road. He relocated it to a model American town he had begun building near his River Rouge plant, which he named Greenfield Village. As an industrial method, too, Fordism had embedded within it the seeds of its own undoing. The breaking down of the assembly process into smaller and smaller tasks, combined with rapid advances in transportation and communication, made it easier for manufacturers to break out of the dependent relationship established by Ford between high wages and large markets. Goods could be made in one place and sold somewhere else, removing the incentive employers had to pay workers enough to buy the products they made. While it would be decades before the implications of this change would become fully apparent, already by the 1920s the component elements of the economy that in Ford’s mind operated as a symbiotic whole—land, labor, resources, manufacturing, finance, and consumption—were drifting apart.

Ford responded by committing even more to his village industries, which he hoped would slow the flow of migrants to the cities, save farms by bringing wage-paying industry to rural areas, and keep families intact—with women in the kitchen and men on the shop floors and in the fields. They also allowed Ford to continue to play humanity’s redeemer, even as he was fending off criticism that his anti-Semitism was perilously inflammatory and his factory system had become a soul-crushing thing. “I sometimes think that the prejudice and narrowness of the present day,” he said, “is due to our intense specialization.” Get workers out into the country. Have them work under an open sky. “If we saw more sides of life . . . we should be better balanced,” he observed. “I think farmers are going to disappear in the course of time. Yes, and factory workers too. Every man will be a farmer some day, and every man will work in a factory or office. We’ve proven that already. I’ve built little factories along the little rivers.”
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Yet his little factories along the little rivers were no match for the raw power of the changes taking place in American society, politics, and culture in the 1920s, and in any case, Congress, after years of debate, had definitively rejected his Muscle Shoals proposal. An alliance of economic and regional political interests made the case that the US government was about to hand to Ford too good, too vague a concession. Would he own the mineral rights to the land? What about timber? What would happen to the project when Ford died?

Building on the criticism, Nebraska’s Republican senator George Norris led the charge against the deal. A committed Progressive—and, particularly irksome to Ford, a close ally of the late Theodore Roosevelt—Norris believed that a project of the scope Ford was proposing should be carried out under the auspices of the federal government and not private interests. The senator was disturbed by the wild land speculations that had gripped the Tennessee Valley upon rumors of Ford’s interest. The Muscle Shoals Land Corporation, founded in Detroit, staked out a tract of land on the banks of the Tennessee River, laid out boulevards with names such as Dearborn Avenue and Michigan Street, and incorporated the site as a city, dubbed “Highland Park.” A group of newspapermen in Detroit pooled their money and bought up a square mile of the “dreamland,” hoping to flip it for a profit. In New York, another start-up cashed in by selling twenty-foot lots of land. “Would you, if you could,” promotional material asked potential customers, “associate yourself with the world’s greatest manufacturer and industrial genius—HENRY FORD? Thousands of people have become independently wealthy through the development of Ford’s gigantic industrial plants in Detroit, Michigan. Mr. Ford has recently stated that he would employ one million men and build a city seventy-five miles long at MUSCLE SHOALS.” After reading of Ford’s plans for the Tennessee Valley in the African American
Chicago Defender
, East Texas bluesman George Thomas captured the get-rich-quick spirit of the times in a song recorded by Bourbon Street–born Lizzie Miles: “Hurry up, Papa, we must leave this town, got the blues for Muscle Shoals, that’s where we sure can get gold.”

Norris was especially repelled to hear poor Southern farmers chanting, “ ‘When Ford comes, . . . when Ford comes,’ as if they were expecting the second coming of Jesus Christ.” Muscle Shoals, he said, was the “most wonderful real estate speculation since Adam and Eve lost title to the Garden of Eden.” Ford’s offer to buy Muscle Shoals passed the House, but Norris and other Progressives opposed to the privatization of national resources, such as Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette, killed it in Senate committee in mid-1924. The streets of Highland Park, with not one house built, soon “disappeared into cotton fields,” wrote an observer, “the sidewalks, under brambles.”
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So Ford began to look abroad to implement a plan of reform that was failing at home. Having been denied the opportunity to redeem a poor rural river valley in Appalachia, he would find another in the Amazon.

____________

*
Despite the peculiarity of many of Ford’s ideas, contemporary social reformers offered similar schemes to commingle urban life and nature and reconcile if not Emersonian then Jeffersonian democracy with the industrial world. Frank Lloyd Wright, for instance, shared Ford’s criticisms of the modern city, particularly the way its immense scale and density threatened to wipe out community and individualism. Wright was directly influenced by Ford’s proposed valley city. He often cited it as inspiration for his own Broadacre City, a planned community meant to showcase an architectural style that would blend organically with the landscape and allow “all that was human in the city to go to the country and grow up with it” (Frank Lloyd Wright,
Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture: Selected Writings, 1894–1940
, ed. Frederick Gutheim, New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1941, p. 144; Frank Lloyd Wright,
Modern Architecture: Being the Kahn Lectures for 1930
, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, pp. 108–9).

*
The term
Fordism
evolved after the
Washington Post
, condemning Ford in 1922 for briefly shutting down his factory rather than pay high coal prices, defined it as “Ford efforts conceived in disregard or ignorance of Ford limitations,” a category in which the paper included the peace ship. Around this time, the term was often interchangeable with
Taylorism
, after Fredrick Taylor, the pioneer of motion analysis who aimed to extract ever greater productivity out of workers through the isolation of the individual tasks needed to make a product. It also denoted standardization, efficiency, and mass production. By the late 1920s, Fordism began to take on its more comprehensive meaning, used to suggest a modernization of economic thought that appreciated the value of high wages as a motor of industrial growth. And sociologists and intellectuals, particularly those in industrialized European countries, started using it in tandem with
Americanism
. In 1927, for instance, an article in London’s
New Statesman
identified Americanism/Fordism as an industrial system in which the pace of the factory determined productivity (as opposed to pace being set by a wage system that rewarded output): “The worker under Fordism is speeded up, whether he likes it or not, by the pace at which the factory runs, by the endless stream of articles ceaselessly propelled toward him by the remorseless chain of machines. He must work at the factory’s pace, or go; and go he will, unless he is offered a special inducement to remain.” But the article also acknowledged that high wages, in addition to serving as an inducement to remain on the line, actually created large markets, which allowed industrialists to increase their takings even as profit margins were reduced: “It was found, not merely that high wages were fully compatible with low costs of production, but that the offer of higher wages still might be so used to stimulate a further fall in cost. High wages therefore became, with some employers, not merely a necessity that had to be faced, but a positive policy” (reprinted in
the Living Age
, May 15, 1927). By the 1950s, the term
Fordism
had worked its way into social science terminology, as scholars began to consider the foundations and implications of the United States’ unprecedented postwar economic expansion.

CHAPTER 5

FORDVILLE

SHORTLY AFTER HIS SUMMER LUNCH WITH HARVEY FIRESTONE where they discussed the proposed British cartel, Henry Ford granted a long-sought audience to Brazil’s New York–based consular inspector, José Custódio Alves de Lima. The Brazilian diplomat had been courting Ford for two years, since reading about his interest in growing rubber in the Florida Everglades, and had sent him samples of Amazon rubber and minerals along with an elegantly carved cabinet made out of assorted rare rain forest hardwoods, all with the purpose of turning his attention to Brazil. De Lima had received permission from the governor of Pará—one of the largest of the Amazonian states—to offer Ford “special inducements,” tax and land concessions, in the hope that the industrialist would help revive the regional economy, depressed since 1910, when Brazil lost its rubber monopoly to Asia.
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As he traveled from New York to Dearborn by train, de Lima reflected on Ford and what his investment in the Amazon would mean for Brazil. By that point, the Model T was more than a car: its speed, simplicity, and durability chanted freedom, its affordability spoke democracy. And Ford Motors had become more than a company. Notwithstanding the criticism its assembly and speedup had provoked, its method of industrial relations, for many the world over, it had become synonymous with modern life, offering the promise of not only efficient production but the increased leisure time needed to enjoy the fruits of efficiency. Fordism,
fordismo
,
fordismus
, or
fordizatsia
—in whatever language, countries hoping to shake off the scent of farm animals and catch up with the United States adopted some aspect of the system pioneered in Detroit and Dearborn. In countries with strong artisanal and mechanic traditions like France, England, Germany, and even the United States, intellectuals and craft unionists condemned Fordism for replacing the craftsman and skilled worker with mindless “jerks, twists, and turns.” Yet by the early twentieth century, the world was increasingly divided between the industrial and the hoped-to-be-industrial. And in the larger latter half, few harped on the downside of steady wages and mass, standardized production of low-cost goods.
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