Fordlandia (36 page)

RUBBER ROUGE

CHAPTER 16

AMERICAN PASTORAL

IT TOOK TIME FOR THE GREAT DEPRESSION TO REACH THE Tapajós, where Henry Ford’s massive infusion of money and resources into the cash-poor economy offset the effects of plummeting commodity prices, capital flight, high interest rates, and declining exports that had shocked Brazil—and the rest of Latin America—immediately after the stock market collapse of October 1929. But back in Detroit, the impact was immediate. The crash hit the city hard, destroying more than two-thirds of its economy. In the years prior to the Depression, city and suburban factories had produced 5,294,000 cars worth $3.7 billion; four years later, the number had fallen to less than two million valued at $1.1 billion. Over 50 percent of the city’s workforce was laid off. Hundreds of thousands of its residents either went on relief or simply packed up and left. Hundreds of thousands became homeless, many finding a bed in an abandoned factory the city had converted into a shelter. The suicide rate skyrocketed; four thousand boys and girls stood on breadlines for their daily meals; and 18 percent of schoolchildren suffered from severe undernourishment. The welfare department was reporting 7,500 monthly evictions. People were found dead on the street, poisoned by putrid food they had scavenged out of garbage cans. At night, men looted grocery stores while children prowled the streets, breaking shop windows and stealing goods. Some families dug holes in the ground for shelter, protected by nothing other than some laid-over brush.
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Ford at first restrained himself from using the crash to scold Wall Street and lash out at the money interests. He instead responded in a way many deemed responsible, preaching his gospel of consumer spending as a way out of the downturn. To back it up, he pledged that not only would he continue production at the Rouge full bore but he would raise his daily minimum wage from $6 to $7 a day. Ford seemed well positioned to lead the recovery: he himself had little invested in stocks, so his personal fortune was untouched, and his company, unlike General Motors, whose share price plummeted, wasn’t publicly traded. Yet demand for the new Model A gradually slowed, and inventories backed up. Ford lowered its price, taking the difference out of dealers’ commissions. But by the end of 1930, there was no margin left for any more reductions. The company quietly began to cut production and to buy more and more parts from outside low-wage suppliers—thus beginning the erosion of the fearsome self-sufficiency of the Ford Motor Company. By early 1931, the company had slashed the number of weekly hours of most workers, rendering meaningless Ford’s vaunted Seven Dollar Day. Later that year, the company officially reduced that as well. And then in August the assembly line ground to a halt—Ford had more cars than customers to buy them. Just four years after its introduction in late 1927, the Model A, which Ford had hoped would have as long a run as the T, was history.
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As Ford approached his seventh decade, the destruction unleashed by the Depression and the fact that his company had been vulnerable to its effects accelerated his cultural conservatism. His worldview grew gnarled and knotted with fear and mistrust, and his mind, as the former head of his Sociological Department once put it, continued on its path to isolation. Forced to recant his anti-Semitism a few years earlier, he never again publicly criticized Jews. But the kind of optimism Ford had expressed early in the Depression took on a hectoring, recriminating tone. He began to link the nation’s economic problems to his critique of the corrosive nature of America’s modern consumer society. With Detroit children digging through garbage cans for food less than ten miles from his Fair Lane estate, Ford said he welcomed the recession’s cleansing destruction, believing it would wash the excesses of the 1920s from the land. He pronounced the Depression a “wholesome thing in general,” the “best times we have ever had.” “It’s a good thing the recovery is prolonged,” Ford said, “otherwise the people wouldn’t profit from the illness.” His spokesman, William Cameron, who had previously penned many of the
Independent
’s anti-Semitic tracts, said on the Ford
Sunday Evening Hour
, a weekly radio show produced in a Ford studio, that the Depression was sent by “good Providence” to force atonement for “our former false prosperity.” “The bad times were back in 1929 and before,” Ford told a reporter. “That was the real panic—that so-called prosperous period. Business, at bottom, never was so bad as it was in what we called boom times.”
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This last comment appeared in a long interview in the
New York Times
whose headline pronounced that Ford “Sees the Dawn of a Bright Future.” Perhaps the interview, published in February 1933, was timed to preempt the momentum building around the cousin of his departed nemesis, Theodore Roosevelt. Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office a month after the interview, and Ford probably found much to like in his inspirational inaugural address. FDR condemned the stubborn incompetence of Wall Street’s “unscrupulous money changers” and admitted that there was an “overbalance of population in our industrial centers.” And he called for the “restoration” of “ancient truths” and “social values more noble than mere monetary profits.” Yet early in his speech, the new president said that only a “foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment,” which the thin-skinned Ford must have taken as a reprimand.

It increasingly seemed to many that Ford’s social criticism was a form of self-rebuke. His reformer image was wearing thin, as he and his company became implicated in many of the modern vices he condemned. Throughout the 1930s, Ford stepped up his jeremiads against crowded, dirty, crime-ridden cities. Yet even before the ruin of the Great Depression, Ford had contributed to the slow decline of Detroit’s downtown by transferring much of his production and administration to Dearborn, paving the way for Chrysler and General Motors to likewise abandon the center of the city. Ford lobbied for Prohibition, saying that Detroit’s distilleries could be converted to make biofuels. Yet the criminalization of alcohol served only to deliver Detroit to gangsterism. Ford railed against finance capitalism even though his company was heavily invested in Detroit’s Guardian Group, a banking house that, when it went bankrupt in 1933, helped spark a nationwide bank panic. Ford aggravated the crisis by first offering to bail out Detroit banks and then, perhaps acting on advice from Harry Bennett, withdrawing the offer. The collapse of the Guardian Group led to a wave of foreclosures of businesses and homes that would devastate the Motor City’s downtown.
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Ford’s social interventions were similarly corrosive. Ford complained about the ease with which technology could be used to manipulate mass society. But through the early 1930s, he lunched regularly with the fascist Catholic “radio priest” Charles Coughlin, who roused his listeners to fits of anti-Semitic rage and defended German Nazi violence against Jews during
Kristallnacht
. Evidence even suggests Ford funded the priest’s campaign. Ford imagined himself a friend of African Americans, hiring them in large numbers—more than his competitors were—and paying them the same as he did whites. Yet most of his African American employees were confined to the Rouge’s worst work, in its foundry, rolling mill, or paint shop, with little opportunity for advancement, while his gradual pullout from Detroit contributed to that city’s deepening poverty and intensifying white vigilantism. And even as he expanded in Dearborn, he refused to challenge that county’s system of segregation, which was considered the worst north of the Mason-Dixon line and lasted into the 1970s. He hired few African Americans outside the Rouge and practically none in his village industry program, designed to give workers a fuller, more balanced life. In his operations in Iron Mountain in the Upper Peninsula, a “concilium” of the KKK organized by Ford mill workers, who used Ford wood and kerosene to build and burn their inaugural cross, drove African American migrants looking for jobs out of town. The plant’s manager issued a statement: “Mr. Ford wasn’t employin’ no colored people.”
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Ford continued to preach pacifism. Yet not only had he already once turned his plants over to wartime production, his system of mass production helped make modern mechanized warfare possible.
*
Ford believed in community, but the highway system that developed in tandem with his car set small-town America on the path to destruction (to save his own childhood farm, he had to pry it from its foundations and move it wholesale). Ford celebrated self-reliance, though he did more than anyone to turn man into a cog in a machine. And of course he valued individualism even as he denied individuals the right to join a union if they wanted, responding to demands for industrial democracy by unleashing Harry Bennett, who throughout the 1930s would leverage his boss’s paranoia and increasing divorce from reality to tighten his grip on the company. Bennett was well known in Detroit and its environs, where he maintained close connections with both law enforcement and the criminal underworld and where the local press treated him affectionately, like a colorful character out of a Damon Runyon story. But the stepped-up brutality committed by Bennett and his men during the Great Depression began to prompt other comparisons—namely to the fascist shock troops then on the march in Germany and Italy.

On Monday, March 7, 1932, Bennett’s “service men” opened fire on a march of laid-off Ford workers and other protesters who arrived at the River Rouge to demand jobs and hunger relief. When the smoke cleared, five protesters were dead, another nineteen seriously injured, and the world outside the Rouge’s gates got a close look, thanks to reporters and photographers on the scene, of what life was like for those who worked for the “despot of Dearborn,” as the writer Edmund Wilson described Ford in
Scribner’s Magazine
. Both Ford and Bennett escaped legal responsibility for the deaths, yet, as historian David Halberstam notes, the worldwide press coverage of the “Dearborn Massacre” was the beginning of the end for Ford’s reputation as a benevolent reformer.
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Since his peace ship, Ford’s philosophizing had been the subject of a good deal of ridicule and his industrial method the focus of serious criticism, but starting in 1932 negative portrayals began to outweigh the positive. Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
, with its forecast of a future made perverse by Fordism, was published just a month before the carnage; Jonathan Leonard’s
The Tragedy of Henry Ford
, which came out a few weeks after, was greeted with a
New York Times
review headlined “Ford, the Small-Town Man Who Killed Small-Town Life.” In 1937, Upton Sinclair’s
The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America
, asked: “What is Henry Ford? What have the years done to him? What has his billion dollars made of him?” Sinclair charged Ford with providing financial support to Hitler in Germany, and his accusation gained credibility a year later when the Nazi consul to Detroit bestowed the Grand Cross of the German Eagle on Ford on his seventy-fifth birthday. After the massacre, there also appeared a number of exposés of “the little man in Henry Ford’s basement”—that is, of Harry Bennett, “general of the gangster army, and boon companion of the old man sitting in his estate on the hill, well within hearing of the shooting.”
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Early 1932, then, with breadlines wrapping around corners, banks failing, factories closing, and protesters being shot in the street, would hardly seem like a promising moment for Diego Rivera to begin work on a celebration of the innovative “spirit of Detroit.”

DIEGO RIVERA WAS relatively well known in the United States as the leading light of Mexico’s muralist revival, an art movement that captured the energy of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. A leftist, Rivera was expelled from Mexico’s Communist Party in 1929 after having been expelled from the Soviet Union the year before for his critical stance against Stalin. He came to the United States in 1930 to paint a series of frescoes for the San Francisco Stock Exchange and the California School of Fine Arts and to stage a retrospective of his work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It was around this time that the Detroit Institute of Arts contacted him and asked him to “help beautify” the walls of its garden courtyard.

Rivera arrived in the city in April, a month after Bennett’s massacre, with a free hand to take as the subject of his mural anything he wanted. The letter commissioning him merely suggested as a theme “something out of the history of Detroit, or some motif suggesting the development of the town.” Edsel Ford, who sat on the DIA’s board, offered to help the artist gain admittance to study any city business or factory that was still running. Rivera, though, knew exactly what he wanted to see and paint: the River Rouge.
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Despite the slowdown, the Rouge was still the grandest achievement of industrial capitalism to date. Rows of machines and belts at the Rouge were placed even closer together than they were in the old Highland Park factory, which meant that the Dearborn compound was larger than it seemed: had its machinery been spaced as it was at Dodge or Chrysler, or Highland Park, the physical plant would have had to be almost double in dimension. The genius of the Rouge, though, was not its size but its synchronized flow, with raw materials and finished parts moved from station to station by lorries, cranes, freight bins, assembly lines, and crisscrossed conveyor belts. The interchangeability of parts had become an obsession for the Ford Motor Company, and in the Rouge, as one employee put it, “every machine tool and fixture was fitted for the production of a single product whose every part had been standardized to the minutest detail.” This is why it was so enormously expensive to switch over from the Model T to the A a few years earlier. Ford had to scrap or refurbish more than three-quarters of the plant’s 45,000 specialized tools (valued at $45 million) and spend millions more buying 4,500 new ones. And the fact that Ford insisted on placing the Rouge’s machines and workstations as close together as possible added to time and cost overruns because, as one worker put it, “the machines were in so tight that sometimes if we had to move a machine, we’d have to move four or five different machines to get that one out.”
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