NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Utopia@h-net.msu.edu (March, 2007)
Howard P. Segal. _Recasting the Machine Age: Henry Ford's Village
Industries_. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. xvi + 244
pp. Appendix, illustrations, notes, bibliographical essay, index. $34.95
(cloth), ISBN 978-1-55849-481-7.
Reviewed for H-Utopia by Rob Vaughan, American Studies
Department, University of Hawaii at Manoa.
The Machine Shop in the Garden
From the 1910s until his death in 1947 Henry Ford developed and expanded
his mammoth Michigan automobile production complex at River Rouge in
Dearborn. At the time, it was among the largest, most centralized
industrial facilities in the world. Every day tons of raw materials and
small parts were delivered by ship, truck, and rail to one end of the
factory complex. Out the other end came a steady stream of cars, trucks,
and farm equipment. Inside, thousands of managers, engineers, designers,
craftsmen, and common laborers toiled as cogs in an intricately complex
manufacturing machine. Outside, the sky was turned black by
smoke-belching foundries, mills, and power plants. Henry Ford's River
Rouge was an industrial marvel, admired throughout the world. It made
him a hero of the new machine age and an avatar of America's industrial
future.
During this era of explosive growth the Ford Motor Company, like most of
its industrial rivals, was becoming more centralized in its
manufacturing and managerial functions. However, it was also a time when
Henry Ford personally embarked on a plan to _decentralize_ production by
developing a system of scaled-down factories located in nearby rural
areas and small towns. It was a dream of the great innovator to create a
network of what he called "village industries" to supply the needs of
River Rouge and other factories. But they would do more than that. The
village industries would act as vehicles of social as well as
technological change. Ford believed that these shops, often located in
the abandoned saw mills and grist mills of the southeastern Michigan
countryside, would preserve America's rural values and folk culture;
balance the country's agricultural past with its technological future;
improve employee morale (as well as employee morals) by allowing workers
to keep "one foot in industry and another foot in the land"; discourage
labor unrest and put a check on union organizing; foment closer bonds
between managers and workers; and, most significantly, improve quality
and profits for the Ford Motor Company.
Howard P. Segal's _Recasting the Machine Age_ is the first systematic
study of Henry Ford's village industries. It is an excellent examination
of this often overlooked aspect of America's industrial past. Segal,
Bird Professor of History at the University of Maine Orono, is a noted
scholar whose specialty is the history of technology. Originally
inspired to undertake this project in 1980 while on a guided tour of ten
of the original nineteen village industries sites, Segal builds upon the
work of previous scholars, such as business historian David L. Lewis. He
also adds to the growing body of literature on technology's influence on
culture and society. _Recasting the Machine Age_ joins such books such
as Cecelia Tichi's _Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in
Modernist America_ (1987), David E. Nye's _American Technological
Sublime_ (1994), and John F. Kasson's _Civilizing the Machine:
Technology and Republican Values in America_ (1976).
In researching _Recasting the Machine Age_ Segal has amassed a wealth of
resources from dozens of archives and collections. In addition, he has
taken several oral histories of the men and women who worked in these
experimental production facilities. He has woven this extensive research
into an informative narrative that recounts the story of Henry Ford's
dream of re-establishing small-scale manufacturing in rural America. He
also explores the larger theme of decentralization in American business,
a theme that had been advocated by both industry and government leaders
since the early twentieth century. In addition, __Recasting the Machine
Age__ connects Ford's village industries with more recent developments,
such as the "small is beautiful" movement of the 1970s and the growth of
high-tech business parks in California's Silicon Valley and along
Massachusetts' Route 128 corridor.
_Recasting the Machine Age_ begins with an epigraph drawn from a 1938
_Life_ magazine profile of the great industrialist and his village
industries dream. "Henry Ford would be less than the man he is if,
walking by the River Rouge, he did not thrill at the sight of his huge
plant growing huger and huger by the day. But the old man's dearest
dream is no longer of piling building on building in metropolitan
congestion. A farm boy who has kept his love of the land, Ford now
visions the 'little factory in a meadow' as the future shape of American
industry.… Henry Ford is convinced that, for happiness and security,
the worker of the future must divide his time between factory and farm"
(p. vi). Thus, Segal poses the first of several questions regarding
Ford's reasons for instituting the village industries project. First,
was Henry Ford's dream of a "little factory in a meadow" just a
knee-jerk reaction to the changes in the land his huge factories helped
unleash? Did the sight of his massive foundries and stamping presses
trigger in him nostalgia for the more human scale of Longfellow's
village smithy? Second, were there other, more sinister motives
involved? By decentralizing production and transferring work to the
countryside was Ford really just trying to stymie union organizers who
were, despite the union-busting efforts of his notorious "Service
Department," already flexing their muscle at his urban plants? Third,
were the village industries just another way to streamline operations by
decentralizing production, cutting costs, and maximizing profits? Was
this just one more example of the great innovator tinkering with his
assembly line and experimenting with a new method of vertical
integration? Fourth, and most important, was Henry Ford's plan
ultimately a utopian quest of social and mechanical engineering? Would
the village industries, the twentieth-century version of Leo Marx's
"machine in the garden," be used to remold American industry (and its
growing workforce) into Henry Ford's vision of the ideal society?
Supplying answers to these questions is no easy task, for Ford, like
most historical figures, was an amazingly complex and often
contradictory man. Segal himself admits that "Henry Ford's motives for
building and funding the village industries are multiple and murky" (p.
ix). Despite this opacity, however, _Recasting the Machine Age_ quite
ably manages to sift through the various rationales offered by Henry
Ford, his publicity department, suspicious labor leaders, Ford
employees, contemporary journalists, and business historians. The result
is a compelling story about the dream of an iconic industrialist and his
efforts to use his village industries to transform both industrial
production and American society.
First, the village industries were, in part, a reaction to the social
fallout associated with large-scale manufacturing. As Segal points out,
Henry Ford remained conflicted about the threats to America's agrarian
way of life (caused in good part by his factories and the machines that
they churned out). "[He] never resolved his mixed feelings about
modernity: above all, the congestion, heterogeneity, rootlessness,
impersonality, inequality, and materialism of twentieth-century American
cities. 'The modern city has done its work and a change is coming,' Ford
told the journalist Drew Pearson in a 1924 interview. 'The city has
taught us much, but the overhead expense of living in such places is
becoming unbearable…. The cities are getting top-heavy and are about
doomed'" (p. 3). Ford realized that the giant factories of
industrialized America were attracting rural and immigrant workers to
the big city. Many of these employees were unattached, single men who
stayed in boarding houses and cheap hotels. In their off hours they
frequented saloons, burlesque shows, and bordellos. Freed from the
constraints of the family farm and village life, the modern factory
worker was increasingly susceptible to the temptations of the depraved
city. If left unchecked, such a situation would no doubt lead to an
unreliable workforce and the demise of everything Ford believed America
stood for.
Workers in Ford's village industries, on the other hand, were expected
to be part-time farmers, running up to hundred-acre spreads in their off
hours and during slack seasons at the plant. Ford believed so much in
farming's benefits to mind, morals, and health that he was even willing
to provide garden plots to landless factory workers just so they could
raise some of their own food. Thus, village industries workers would be
able to keep "one foot in industry and another foot in the land"--while
driving a Ford between the two. Small-town America would be revitalized,
as would American agrarian values and folk life. Rooted to the land, the
rural workforce would help balance the ill effects of big city
factories.
So, Ford's solution to the problems of the modern factory was not simply
a headlong retreat into the past. His village industries were not just
reconstructions of old manufacturing buildings and a duplication of the
antiquated production methods they once housed. His make-over of grist
mills and other small-scale industrial buildings scattered around the
Michigan countryside was nothing like the reconstruction of Colonial
Williamsburg, which was undertaken at about the same time.[1]
At Ford's converted mills there would be no displays of old-time crafts
such as candle making, quilting, or butter churning. His dabbling in
historic preservation was not meant to display an obsolete past with
buildings and production practices trapped in amber. There would be no
evoking of nostalgia for a bygone era. Rather, the village industries
were for showcasing a _usable past_, one that would couple the best of
previous eras with the latest technology. As Segal writes, Ford's
village industries were to be "sophisticated _alternative_ forms of [an]
emerging technological society, intended as models for others to
emulate" (p. 7, emphasis in original). They were not recreations of
village life, but rather industrial successors to the nineteenth-century
Massachusetts manufacturing towns of Lowell, Lawrence, and Waltham,
which were also pioneering industrial communities located in pastoral
locales. Although Ford's village industries might have been located in
old grist mills, complete with functioning water wheels and set among
bucolic greenery, these small-scale plants were equipped with the latest
technology, with machinery that converted soybeans into plastic parts or
churned out precision gauges, car horns, or headlight assemblies.
Second, although some have suggested that Ford's attempts at
decentralization were primarily a way to neutralize the growing power of
labor unions at River Rouge, the truth is not so simple. As Segal
argues, even though the village industries did in fact make it more
difficult to organize the small, relatively isolated shops, this was not
Ford's primary motive. If union busting was his main goal he would have
shifted large branch plants to the South where labor was weak and
right-to-work laws favored employers. Yes, unions suffered under the
village industries project, but Ford saw it more as a beneficial side
effect than as the main motivating principle.
Third, the question of whether or not the village industries made
economic sense to the Ford Motor Company as a whole, Segal tells us, is
largely unanswerable. They remained a private project of Henry Ford
himself, more laboratory experiments than profit centers subject to
sharp-eyed corporate accountants. Besides, the haphazard state of the
company's books, even as the Ford Motor Company became one of the
world's largest manufacturers, made determining profitability of
individual production units difficult, if not impossible. Yet,
decentralization was a business principle that Henry Ford embraced
wholeheartedly, as did many of his fellow industrialists and government
policymakers. Managers at River Rouge saw early on that completed Model
T's could only fit four to a railroad car. While in their disassembled
state, the same rail cars could hold ten to twelve automobiles. It was
not long before Model T's were shipped as parts with final assembly done
in Ford's California or East Coast plants. If decentralized production
like this could produce huge savings, it became accepted that similar
economies might be realized in the village industries project.
Fourth, was Henry Ford's village industries experiment a utopian
project, one man's vision of creating a more perfect America through
social engineering? This is, perhaps, the most intriguing question
raised in __Recasting the Machine Age__. Howard Segal has addressed the
topic of technology and utopia in previous books, including
_Technological Utopianism in American Culture_ (1985; 2005) and _Future
Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America_ (1994). In
addition, he has written on other aspects of technology and utopia in
several published papers and reviews. _Recasting the Machine Age_ can be
seen as an addition to this outstanding body of work. In short, Segal
argues that by the time of the village industries project Henry Ford had
become both a social engineer as well as a mechanical one. He saw
himself forging men as well as machines; remaking American society as
dramatically as his factories had transformed the landscape.
Although he was not one to immerse himself in history books,[2] and it
is unlikely Henry Ford was acquainted with America's many previous
utopian experiments, his village industries should be seen as part of
the utopian tradition in the U.S. He too felt that by perfecting the
nature of work he could perfect the individual and society. Segal
describes New Lanark, Oneida, and the Shaker communities, all of which
established small-scale industries within rural settings. (Although he
does not mention Brook Farm, it should be noted that they constructed a
relatively large, steam-powered shoe manufacturing plant in the
Massachusetts countryside.)[3] Yet, Ford's enterprise was different from
these communitarian and cooperative ventures. As a highly
individualistic, self-made man Ford found communitarian ventures an
anathema. As an unreconstructed capitalist with a top-down view of
organizational hierarchies, he disdained cooperative schemes as
artificial ways to drive up prices. And unlike George Pullman, the
Sleeping Car King, whose model town of Pullman was meant as an example
for progressive industrialists, Henry Ford refused to consider building
worker housing because he felt it would destroy their initiative. Nor
did Ford wish to build a "company town." He had no desire to control the
political or economic lives of his workers. (It is curious, however,
that Segal makes no mention of chocolate mogul Milton Hershey's
eponymously named model town in rural Pennsylvania, the construction of
which overlaps Ford's village industries. It might have made for an
instructive comparison, especially regarding the role of work in a
pastoral, small-town setting.)[4]
Nevertheless, Henry Ford's village industries project was far more than
an experiment in manufacturing decentralization. At its heart was
nothing less than a utopian attempt to transform American society by
synthesizing the values of its agrarian past with its technological
future. Despite eschewing the communitarian and cooperative ideologies
of the majority of American utopian experiments, Ford's village
industries were conceived in the same transformative spirit.
Constructing a "machine shop in the garden," as Henry Ford set out to
do, is an integral part of America's capacity to dream, and to construct
the perfect society. Howard P. Segal has written an important book that
extends the scholarship of both the history of technology in America as
well as its utopian ideals.
Notes
[1]. In fact, the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg was funded
largely by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the oil magnate's son, after Henry
Ford declined to become involved.
[2]. Once, while under oath in a civil trial, Henry Ford admitted he had
never heard of Napoleon.
[3]. See Sterling F. Delano's _Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia_
(Cambridge. Mass.: Belknap/Harvard, 2004).
[4]. See Michael D'Antonio's _Hershey: Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary
Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams_ (New York: Simon & Schuster,
2006).
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