Fordism, Labor, and the Romance of the Giant Factory
IN A 1926 ENTRY IN THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA, Henry Ford (or the publicist who ghostwrote the article) defined “mass production” as “the modern method by which great quantities of a single standardized commodity are manufactured.” If anyone knew about the manufacture of “great quantities of a single standardized commodity,” it was Ford. His Model T, introduced in 1908, turned the automobile from a luxury plaything into a mass-consumer good. Prior to then, automobile companies typically manufactured at most a few thousand cars a year. By 1914, the Ford Motor Company was rolling out nearly a quarter of a million Model Ts annually. By the time the company stopped selling the iconic model in 1927, fifteen million had been produced.1
Henry Ford’s worldwide fame stemmed as much from the methods his company used to make the Model T as from the car itself. To manufacture it, the Ford Motor Company built some of the largest factories that ever had been seen and introduced countless technical and organizational innovations, including the assembly line, which enormously increased the speed and efficiency of production. To control the tens of thousands of workers who populated its plants, the company devised new methods of labor management that extended beyond the factory walls into workers’ homes and minds. Ford pioneered what amounted to a new political economy of inexpensive consumer products that transformed people’s lives, high-volume factories to produce them, and high wages and strict controls to discipline the workforce. Before Ford himself popularized the term “mass production,” commentators often spoke of “Fordism,” “Ford methods,” or the “Ford system,” appropriate terms for the new production, distribution, and consumption regime, for it was Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company that ushered in a new phase of industrialization and a factory scale that would be unsurpassed for nearly a century.2
Just as the “factory system” of early nineteenth-century England captured the interest and imagination of journalists, political activists, writers, and artists, so, too, did the “Ford system” of the twentieth century. Once again, it seemed like a new world was aborning. Part of what made Fordism so transfixing was the promise of a wholesale rise in the standard of living and amelioration of the class conflict that had been shaking the United States. In 1924 merchant and reformer Edward Filene wrote that in Fordism lay “a finer and fairer future than most of us have even dared to dream.” Beyond the social implications of Fordism, many writers, painters, filmmakers, and photographers were entranced by the physical structures in which it unfolded. More than with earlier industrial production, artists and intellectuals explicitly linked Fordism to modernist trends in art and society. The great photographer Margaret Bourke-White, who through her work in Fortune and Life magazines did more than any other individual to popularize industrial imagery, captured the age when she bluntly declared “I worship factories.”3
The Road to Mass Production
The Ford system was a culmination of past manufacturing practices and a radical break from them. Almost from the start, American factories had been engaged in the production of “great quantities of a single standardized commodity,” be it the white sheeting made in Waltham or the rails that drove the expansion of the iron and steel industry. But automobiles were of an entirely different order of complexity. It was a long road to enable such complicated machinery to be produced on a mass scale.
Fordism built on two manufacturing innovations, interchangeable parts and continuous flow. Until the early nineteenth century, products with interacting metal parts, like guns or clocks, were individually made by skilled artisans, who spent a great deal of time fitting together parts, filing and adjusting them to make sure they worked together. No one finished product was exactly like the next.
The standardization of parts occurred first in the United States. Generally, introducing interchangeable parts initially increased the cost of production, since it required a huge investment in specialized machines, tools, jigs, and fixtures and a great deal of experimentation to achieve the tolerances that made it possible to assemble a product from a pile of parts without custom fitting. The key innovations took place before the Civil War in New England armories. The military greatly valued the ease of repair allowed by interchangeable parts and cared less about costs than private manufacturers. “Armory practice” slowly spread to the making of clocks, sewing machines, typewriters, agricultural equipment, bicycles, and other civilian products.4
American conditions promoted standardization and interchangeability. A mass market existed that justified heavy capital investment and that was hard to take full advantage of without uniformity. In 1855, 400,000 brass clocks were produced in the United States. During the Civil War, three million rifles were used.5 A shortage of skilled workers and relatively high wages made it expensive and sometimes impossible to produce complex products in large quantities using traditional artisanal methods. With interchangeable parts, skilled workers were still needed to build specialized machinery and tooling, but less skilled workers could churn out parts and assemble them.6
None of this was easy to achieve. The Singer Manufacturing Company, one of the most celebrated manufacturers of its day, illustrated the challenge. Well before the Civil War, the company emerged as a leader in the sewing machine industry, selling a high-priced model made with traditional metalworking techniques. During the war, Singer began mechanizing, but it would take almost two decades before the company fully achieved interchangeable parts. In the interim, it expanded by hiring more and more workers to make parts using some specialized machinery and employing fleets of fitters, who filed and adjusted them. The factory Singer erected in Elizabethport, New Jersey, in 1873 was reportedly the largest in the United States making one product in a single building. Journalists wrote about it, tourists visited it, it appeared on postcards. Along with a second Singer plant in Scotland, it produced an extraordinary 75 percent of the world’s sewing machines. Yet even when in 1880 the company was turning out a half million machines a year, they were still assembled, like almost all complex metal products at the time, by carrying all the needed parts to workstations where workers assembled one machine at a time, filing and finishing when less than true interchangeability had been achieved.7
Continuous flow operation ultimately led to a radically different approach to assembly. The idea of keeping material moving as workers conducted various operations first developed in industries handling liquid or semiliquid products, most notably oil refining. Grain milling, brewing, and canning came next. But the industry that apparently had the greatest influence on Ford was meatpacking, where the disassembly of animals was done by hanging newly killed carcasses on an overhead conveyor, moving them from worker to worker, each of whom made a particular cut or removed particular pieces, until the animal had been reduced to smaller chunks of meat that might then undergo further processing. Implicit in continuous flow processing was an intense division of labor; each worker performed just one or a few operations on something going by or momentarily standing still, rather than many operations on a stationary object.8
Ford began experimenting with continuous assembly in 1913, five years after introducing the Model T. Henry Ford had been born during the Civil War, to a farm family in Dearborn, Michigan, near Detroit. Beginning as a machine shop apprentice, he worked his way up through a variety of jobs before becoming the chief engineer in Detroit for the Edison Illuminating Company. He built his first car in 1896, proving his models’ worth by racing them. He founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903 with investors who supplied the capital needed to take on the expensive business of making automobiles. In 1907 he wrested control of the firm from his partners. Aiming at rural America, Ford conceived of the Model T as a lightweight vehicle, sturdy enough to withstand the terrible roads that farmers depended on but simple enough for them to repair themselves and for him to produce at a price they could afford.9
Sold through a network of independent distributors, the Model T proved an instant hit. Sales zoomed from 5,986 units in 1908 to 260,720 in 1913, as the price of the touring model dropped from $850 to $550 ($13,629 in 2017 dollars).10 Part of the reason Ford could make so many cars and sell them so cheaply was product standardization. “The way to make automobiles,” Henry Ford said, “is to make one automobile just like another . . . . just like one pin is like another pin when it comes from the pin factory, or one match is like another match when it comes from the match factory.” Ford, perhaps unconsciously, echoed Adam Smith’s famous use of pin manufacturing in The Wealth of Nations to illustrate the savings that could come from the division of labor in producing a standardized product. From 1909 on, the Ford Motor Company only produced the Model T. The vehicle’s different body styles all used the same chassis. For most of its history, it was available only in black.11
With just one model produced in high volume, Ford could invest heavily in equipment and experimentation to manufacture it as efficiently as possible. The tremendous profits the Model T generated freed him from depending on outside investors or Wall Street—which he despised—to expand his plants and add new machinery. Ford toolmakers developed specialized fixtures and jigs to simplify and speed up operations. One machine simultaneously drilled forty-five holes into engine blocks from four sides, replacing the numerous setups and operations needed for the same result using traditional methods. The adoption of single-purpose machinery also helped ensure that tolerances would be met for interchangeability and easy assembly. The company boasted that “You might travel round the world in a Model T and exchange crankshafts with any other Model T you met enroute, and both engines would work as perfectly after the exchange as before. . . . All Ford parts of the same kind are perfectly interchangeable.”
Specialized machines also were a strategy to deal with the severe shortage, high wages, and union orientation of skilled workers in the Detroit area as the automobile industry took off. Ford engineers called their jigs and fixtures “farmers’ tools,” since they allowed new workers to produce high-quality parts, lessening the need for skilled machinists and their craft culture. (Preferring workers with no craft background had a long history among American manufacturers; arms maker Samuel Colt once said “the more ignorant a man was, the more brains he had for my purpose.”) The Ford company also made extensive use of stamped parts, a practice adopted from the bicycle industry, cheaper and easier than casting and machining.12
For most of the nineteenth century, standard machine shop practice had been to group machines together by type—all lathes in one area, drill presses in another, and so on—which required a significant expenditure of manpower to move pieces from one area to another as the production process proceeded. By the early twentieth century, the most advanced manufacturers, including the Olds Motor Works, which made the Oldsmobile, and Ford began what Ford called “the planned orderly progression of the commodity through the shop.” Placing machine tools, carbonizing furnaces, and other equipment in the sequence in which they were used reduced the time spent on transporting unfinished parts and made immediately obvious where holdups were occurring. Here was a spatial embodiment of the logical flow Marx saw in the mid-nineteenth century when he wrote that in a “real machinery system” “[e]ach detail machine supplies raw material to the machine next in order.”
At Ford, progressive placement of machinery went hand in hand with an ever-greater division of labor. Each workstation was manned by a worker who did only one or a few tasks, usually simplified by the creation of equipment designed to do just those operations, over and over again. The gains in productivity were enormous. In 1905, with three hundred workers, Ford produced twenty-five cars a day; three years later, with some five hundred workers, it rolled out one hundred.13
Next came installing mechanical devices to move parts from one workstation to another, rather than doing so by hand, applying continuous flow processing to complex manufacturing. In 1913, Ford began experimenting with a conveyor system in its foundry and with slide rails and tables for assembling magnetos and transmissions, having workers stand still while parts for processing or assembling moved past them. Before the new system was installed, it took a single worker about twenty minutes to assemble a magneto at a stationary workbench. After Ford introduced what would become called an assembly line, splitting up the process into twenty-nine separate steps, it took fourteen workers a cumulative time of five minutes to make a magneto, a fourfold increase in productivity.14
Inspired by the enormous savings, Ford engineers turned to the assembly of chassis and finished cars. Originally, Ford assembled its cars following the standard practice for manufacturing complex machinery: “we simply started to put a car together at a spot on the floor,” Ford recalled, “and workmen brought to it the parts as they were needed in exactly the same way that one builds a house.” Other early automakers also used the “craft method” of assembling vehicles on stationary sawhorses or wooden stands.
With the Model T, Ford moved from having a team of workers assemble an entire automobile to breaking down the assembly process into many discrete steps. At stationary stands, arrayed in a large circle, cars were put together piece by piece, with parts carried to the stands as they were needed. But rather than working on one car until it was completed, workers walked around the circle, at each stand doing just one particular operation—attaching the frame to the axles or fitting in the engine or installing the steering wheel. After the last operation (fitting in the floorboards), the completed car was removed for testing and shipment and the first parts for a new vehicle were laid out at the station. In mid-1913, the Model T assembly area had a hundred stations, with five hundred assemblers cycling around them and another hundred workers bringing them parts.15
Figure 4.1 The magneto assembly line at Ford’s Highland Park factory in Detroit in 1913.
From there it was just one small step, but a world-historic revolution, to keeping the workers stationary and moving the vehicles as they were being assembled. In August 1913, Ford engineers tried pulling chassis frames through a corridor of preplaced parts, with assemblers walking along with the vehicles installing them. Then they switched to positioning stationary workers along the path of the vehicles, having them attach parts to the chassis being slowly pulled past by a chain drive below. By April 1914, the assembly line had reduced the labor time needed for final assembly of a car from twelve and a half hours to ninety-three minutes.
The success of the final assembly line led to a burst of innovation, as Ford engineers introduced gravity slides, rollways, conveyor belts, chain-driven assembly lines, and other material-handling systems to various subassembly operations, everything from putting together motors to upholstering seats. Many of the subassembly lines fed directly into the final line, delivering engines, wheels, radiators, other components, and, ultimately, finished bodies to the appropriate spots for their installation on the moving chassis. Just as at the Derby silk mill and the Waltham cotton mill, a new system of production came together in a remarkably short period of time. In less than two years after the first experiments with the assembly line, Ford had installed the system for all phases of Model T production. The factory had become one huge, integrated machine.16
Ford Labor Problems and the Five Dollar Day
Some of the productivity gain of the assembly line came from the greater efficiency of material handling. Some came from the increased division of labor. But much of it came from the sheer intensification of work, the elimination of the ability of workers to wander around looking for a part or tool, to slow down while a foreman wasn’t watching, or to store up finished parts to allow resting later on. For assembly-line workers, work was relentless and repetitious, a single task or just a few done over and over again, every time a new part or subassembly or chassis appeared before them.17
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, management experts considered “soldiering” (workers deliberately working at less than a maximum possible pace) the paramount obstacle to efficiency and profits. To counter it, they devised all sorts of schemes, from elaborate systems of piecework pay to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management.” The assembly line provided an alternate solution to the same problem, having machinery set the pace of work rather than foremen or incentives. Well before Ford adopted the assembly line, packing house managers saw the possibilities in mechanically pacing production; in 1903, a Swift supervisor said, “if you need to turn out a little more, speed up the conveyers a little and the men speed up to keep pace.”18
Assembly-line work proved physiologically and psychologically draining in ways other types of labor were not. More than ever before, workers were extensions of machinery, at the mercy of its demands and its pace. One worker complained, “The weight of a tack in the hands of an upholsterer is insignificant, but if you have to drive eight tacks in every Ford cushion that goes by your station within a certain time, and know that if you fail to do it you are going to tie up the entire platform, and you continue to do this for four years, you are going to break under the strain.” Another said, “If I keep putting on Nut No. 86 for about 86 more days, I will be Nut No. 86 in the Pontiac bughouse.” Ford workers complained that assembly-line work left them in a nervous condition they dubbed “Forditis.” Speed, dexterity, and endurance, not knowledge and skill, were the attributes needed for assembly-line work. Men aged quickly on the line, no longer considered desirable workers well before middle age.19
The swelling sales of Model Ts left the Ford Motor Company with a voracious appetite for labor, especially “operators,” unskilled workers who by 1913 constituted a majority of the workforce. From about 450 employees in 1908, the company leaped to roughly 14,000 in 1913. The Highland Park factory, where Model Ts were made, averaged 12,888 workers in 1914, a size that surpassed even the largest nineteenth-century plants.
Highland Park was not unique. Big and very big factories were becoming more common in the United States. In 1914 there were 648 manufacturing establishments with over one thousand workers. By 1919, there were 1,021 (54 of which made automobiles or automobile parts or bodies), which together employed 26.4 percent of the manufacturing workforce. Rising demand led firms to expand existing facilities, as many companies preferred to keep manufacturing centralized near their administrative headquarters, expediting supervision and coordination. General Electric had 15,000 workers at its Schenectady, New York, complex and 11,000 at a plant in Lynn, Massachusetts. Pullman and International Harvester each employed 15,000 workers at their Chicago plants. Goodyear Tire and Rubber had 15,500 employees in Akron, Ohio.
With its best-selling car and assembly-line operations, Ford soon leaped to a whole new scale. In 1916, Highland Park averaged 32,702 workers; in 1924, 42,000.20 Photographs of the inside of the plant show workers standing literally elbow to elbow, a density of human labor unlike anything seen in textile or steel mills or other types of manufacturing. They were crammed together not just because of their sheer numbers but by design. Ford engineers wanted workers and machines placed as close to one another as possible, to minimize the time and effort needed to transport parts and subassemblies.21
When Ford introduced the assembly line, extraordinarily high turnover added to the company’s difficulty in meeting its ever-growing need for workers. Turnover was a general problem for American industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Skilled workers were loyal to their craft, not their employer, often changing jobs to learn new skills or try a different environment. Unskilled workers left their jobs to seek higher pay, to take a vacation (in an era before employers provided any), when they had a dispute with a foreman, or for myriad other reasons. Staying put had no particular benefit.22
Ford methods pushed the turnover rate through the roof. Many workers hated Ford’s extremely routinized, repetitive work and the stressful pace of production, quitting often after only short tenures. Most simply walked away, never formally resigning. In 1913, the year the assembly line was introduced, Ford had an astounding turnover rate of 370 percent. To maintain a workforce of a bit less than 14,000, that year the company had to hire more than 52,000 workers. Absenteeism added to the difficulties; on any given day, 10 percent of Ford workers did not show up.
Ford had other labor problems, too. Increasingly, the labor pool in Detroit was made up of immigrant workers, especially in the unskilled ranks. In 1914, foreign-born workers made up 71 percent of the Ford workforce, from twenty-two different national groups. A babel of languages meant that workers often could not communicate with foremen or one another. One supervisor recalled that “every foreman had to learn in English, German, Polish and Italian” to say “hurry up.” Ethnic tensions sometimes exploded into fistfights. In January 1914, the company fired over eight hundred Greek and Russian workers for staying home to celebrate what by their Orthodox Christian calendar was Christmas but for the company was just another production day.
Detroit automakers, including Ford, also worried about unions. The introduction of the assembly line coincided with a national surge of labor militancy. In Detroit, both the radical Industrial Workers of the World and the new Carriage, Wagon, and Automobile Workers’ Union, affiliated with the more moderate American Federation of Labor, launched organizing drives in the auto industry, leading a few short strikes. Their gains were modest, but their specter haunted employers.23
Ford responded to its labor problems with a program of higher pay and shorter hours, “The Five Dollar Day.” Already, the company had begun instituting policies to retain employees and increase their productivity. In 1913, it introduced a multitiered wage plan that boosted pay as workers’ skills grew and, with longevity, a spur to self-improvement and steady employment. In early January 1914, the company went farther, shortening the workday from nine hours to eight (six days a week), which reduced the strain on workers while allowing Highland Park to go from two shifts to three. And more dramatically, it announced that it would effectively double the wages of unskilled workers, from somewhat below $2.50 to $5.00 a day. The wage boost set a precedent for mass production, especially automobile manufacturing, to be a high-wage system. Supporters hailed high wages for allowing workers to buy the kinds of goods they made, creating the mass purchasing power necessary to keep mass production going.
But the Five Dollar Day was more ambitious and more complicated than just a wage boost. Technically, it was not a pay increase at all but a possibility for workers to get what was dubbed a profit-sharing payment that would bring their daily income up to five dollars. Qualification was not automatic; women were not eligible (at least initially), male workers generally had to be over twenty-one, and, most importantly, they had to abide by a set of standards and regulations the company set, aimed not only at behavior in the factory but away from it, too. Workers had to be legally married to their partners, “properly” support their families, maintain good “home conditions,” demonstrate thrift and sobriety, and be efficient at their jobs. Ford established a “Sociological Department” to investigate if workers were eligible for the profit sharing and to guide them in behavioral change if they were not.
Fifty investigators, often accompanied by translators, made home visits to Ford workers to assess their qualifications for the plan. After an initial round of investigations, 40 percent of the workers eligible by age and sex were deemed deficient in some respect to receive the payments. Failure to rectify their behavior within a given period led to dismissal, but improvements could win retroactive profit-sharing.
Ford was particularly concerned with “Americanizing” immigrant workers. Sociological Department agents encouraged them to adopt American habits and teach their children American ways. Workers who did not speak English were heavily pressured to attend an English school the company established, which taught “industry and efficiency” and American customs and culture along with language. Some 16,000 workers graduated in 1915 and 1916 alone, reducing the non-English-speaking component of the workforce from 35 percent in 1914 to 12 percent in 1917.24
There were precedents for many aspects of the Ford labor policies. The Lowell-style mills had their own elaborate regulations for behavior on and off the job. Like Ford, the mill owners had the challenge of establishing behavioral norms and worker self-discipline necessary for the collective, integrated nature of factory work. And like Ford, they had moral concerns that extended beyond the factory walls. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a new wave of behavior-shaping programs began as many companies, especially manufacturers with large plants, initiated “welfare work” to increase worker productivity and reduce turnover. Companies built cafeterias, libraries, and “rest rooms”; offered recreational activities, health services, and pensions; established savings and insurance plans; and occasionally introduced the type of social work Ford imposed.
But the comprehensiveness of the Ford program, its intrusiveness, and its link to a doubling of wages put it at the forefront of employer efforts to shape the behavior and mindset of employees to make them fit into a factory regimen. S. S. Marquis, who became head of the Sociological Department in late 1915 (renaming it the Educational Department in response to widespread worker criticism of the home investigations), wrote: “as we adapt the machinery in the shop to turning out the kind of automobile we have in mind, so we have constructed our educational system with a view to producing the human product in mind.”25
Ford executives would have agreed with Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci when he wrote, “In America rationalization has determined the need to elaborate a new type of man suited to a new type of work and production process.” Henry Ford’s rural Protestant moralism, with its stress on thrift, sexual rectitude, and spurning of alcohol and tobacco, prescribed a way of life that Ford executives—and Gramsci—saw as necessary for the physical and psychological demands of mass production. As the Italian communist, sounding like an auto executive, noted, “The employee who goes to work after a night of ‘excess’ is no good for his work.” “The enquiries conducted by the industrialists into the workers’ private lives,” Gramsci cautioned, “and the inspection services created by some firms to control the ‘morality’ of their workers are necessities of the new methods of work. People who laugh at these initiatives . . . and see in them only a hypocritical manifestation of ‘puritanism’ thereby deny themselves any possibility of understanding the importance, significance and objective import of the American phenomenon, which is also the biggest collective effort to date to create . . . a new type of worker and a new type of man.”26
Ironically, by the time Gramsci wrote his essay “Americanism and Fordism” (in prison after his 1926 arrest by the fascist Italian government), Henry Ford already had abandoned his effort to create “a new type of man.” As part of a cost-cutting drive during the 1920–21 recession, Ford shrank the responsibilities of the original Sociological Department until it effectively disappeared. He also abandoned his profit-sharing scheme, switching to a basic wage rate of six dollars a day (an income boost less than inflation), with bonuses based on skill and longevity. Deeming paternalism and welfare work too expensive and a threat to the control of the factory by production officials, Ford instead turned to an elaborate spy system and autocratic management to control labor. The “Service Department,” into which he folded the remnants of the Sociological Department, was headed by a Harry Bennett, a former boxer with extensive ties to the police and organized crime, who used spies and brute force to maintain discipline, hiring many ex-convicts to do the job.27 But if Ford himself abandoned the link between mass production and the creation of a “new man,” the idea itself would live on for decades, including in some very different places.
Alfred Kahn and the Modern Factory
To make the Model T, Ford created not only a new production system but also new types of factory structures, which became templates for generations of giant factories around the world. Their technical and visual legacy remains strong today.
Ford’s first factory, on Mack Avenue in Detroit, had been a small, one-story, wood-framed building. His second, completed in 1904 on Piquette Avenue, was considerably larger, a handsome, three-story brick building. But in design it differed little from an early nineteenth-century textile factory: long and narrow, with large windows and wooden columns, beams, and floors.28
Even before Model T production began, Ford anticipated that his company would soon outgrow Piquette Avenue, purchasing land in nearby Highland Park for a new plant. To design the factory he hired Detroit architect Alfred Kahn, who would become the foremost factory designer of the twentieth century. Kahn stumbled into industrial architecture early in his career, somewhat by chance. Eclectic in his commissions and styles, Kahn, a German Jewish immigrant, met Henry B. Joy, the head of the pioneer automaker Packard Motor Company, who helped him get a number of nonindustrial commissions before asking him to design a new factory complex for his firm.29
The first nine buildings Kahn designed for Packard were conventional. But the tenth was a radical departure, made not of wood and brick but of reinforced concrete. In designing it, Kahn worked closely with his brother Julius, who had developed a system for reinforcing concrete with a particular type of metal bar.
Reinforced concrete, first used in Europe during the 1870s and in the United States not long after, was strong, resistant to vibration, inexpensive, and fireproof. It allowed for large, uninterrupted spaces and a greater window area than older construction methods. A concrete shoe factory, built in Massachusetts in 1903–04, brought the material to the attention of industrial architects. Kahn’s 1905 reinforced concrete Packard Plant Number 10, with its large window area and orderly layout, attracted much attention, as did a plant he built the following year in Buffalo for the George N. Pierce Company, which incorporated overhead cranes and rail platforms for loading, unloading, and moving materials.30 So when Ford hired him, Kahn already had begun building a reputation as an innovative factory designer.
The Highland Park complex extended Kahn’s earlier work. The exterior walls of the main four-story factory building were mostly glass, allowing in so much light that observers dubbed it the “Crystal Palace,” a reference to the London exhibition hall built over a half century earlier. Kahn convinced Ford to allow him to use metal window sashes, at the time so unusual that they had to be ordered from England, which gave the building a particularly clean, modern look. Inside, the large open spaces facilitated the experiments that led to the assembly line.
But in some ways, the initial Highland Park buildings still harkened back to traditional factory design. The long, narrow main building, with stairs, elevators, and toilets in four external towers, had the proportions and layout of a Lowell mill, even if much larger. The adjacent one-story machine shop, with its sawtooth roof, resembled an English weaving shed. Even after the assembly line had been installed in the factory, some material, including car bodies, was moved by horse-drawn cart.31
Kahn’s 1914 addition to Highland Park, the “New Shop,” represented a more radical break from the past. Almost immediately after Highland Park opened, Ford began adding more Kahn-designed buildings to the tightly clustered complex, including an administration building and a large power plant. It soon needed new assembly space as well. The company decision to begin making parts that it previously had bought from outside suppliers, along with the growing volume of production and a growing workforce, left the main factory crowded almost as soon as it was completed. Furthermore, the assembly line and the rapid pace of production made material handling an ever-greater priority, as large quantities of raw materials, parts, and subassemblies needed to be delivered to particular points along various assembly lines at a pace that avoided pileups of inventory or shortages that stopped production.
Kahn’s solution in the New Shop was to build two parallel six-story factory buildings, connected by an 842-foot-long, glass-roofed shed. Along the bottom ran railroad tracks, so that trainloads of supplies could be brought directly into the plant. Along the top ran two overhead cranes that could lift loads of up to five tons to some two hundred platforms jutting out from all levels of the adjacent buildings. From the platforms it was only a short distance to any place within the new buildings, allowing workers to use hand trucks to quickly deliver supplies to the many workstations within. Strikingly modern, the craneway, with concrete and glass buildings making up its walls, the staggered pattern of the jutting platforms, and its glass roof, was a new kind of space, resembling more the great nineteenth-century shopping arcades, like the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, stripped of ornamentation, than a traditional factory.
Inside the New Shop, the foundry and machine shop were positioned on the top floor rather than on the bottom level, the usual practice, possible because of the strength of the reinforced concrete construction. Production could then flow downward, as parts and subassemblies were lowered from floor to floor by gravity slides and conveyor belts, until reaching the final assembly line on the ground level. Air circulation was accomplished through ducts inside hollow concrete columns, an approach reminiscent of that used in English factories by Lombe, Arkwright, and Strutt over a century earlier.32
The Highland Park factory almost immediately became the object of enormous worldwide attention for its design, its assembly line, its experiment in high-pay paternalism, and the Model Ts that came out of it. Ford sought the attention, using the building complex as an advertisement for his firm. (Manufacturers had been doing variations of this for decades, designing handsome factories adorned with large signs, putting engravings of their plants on their stationery, allowing postcards of them to be issued, and sometimes welcoming journalists.33) The freestanding administration building was handsomely designed and carefully landscaped. The nearby power plant had plate glass windows, allowing passersby to look in at the giant generators. Henry Ford insisted that the plant have five chimneys, so giant letters spelling out Ford could be positioned between them, though fewer chimneys would have sufficed. In 1912, the company began conducting public tours of the plant. By the summer of 1915, three to four hundred people a day were visiting. To further publicize the factory, Ford issued a booklet detailing its operations, with pictures from its own, in-house Photographic Department (which also produced weekly short films to distribute to Ford dealers and local theaters).34
Figure 4.2 An aerial view of Ford’s Highland Park factory in 1923.
Among the most important visitors to Highland Park was Giovanni Agnelli, the chairman of the Italian automaker FIAT, who came away determined to adapt Ford methods to the European auto industry, which still largely made cars through handcrafting. To accommodate the Ford system, he commissioned a new factory in the Lingotto district of Turin, which opened in 1923. The plant—one of the great landmarks of modernist architecture—was Highland Park turned on its head. Like the New Shop, it had two long, linked, parallel buildings for assembly operations, each five stories high and over a quarter mile long. In the huge courtyard between the buildings, two spiral ramps connected all of the floors to the roof. In an opposite procedure from Highland Park, raw materials were delivered on the ground floor and production proceeded upward until finished cars were driven onto a test track on the roof, with banked curves that allowed high speeds. Then the cars were driven down a ramp for delivery. (In a ricochet, when Kahn designed an eight-story service center for Packard on the West Side of Manhattan, he included two interior ramps that allowed access to a rooftop test track.)35
Highland Park positioned Kahn as the leading architect for the automobile industry. He was soon designing factories for the Hudson Motor Company, the Dodge brothers, Fisher Body, Buick, and Studebaker, as the industry rapidly adopted both the assembly line and reinforced concrete construction. Ultimately his firm designed a wide range of industrial buildings, not only in North America but in South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa as well. Kahn also designed office buildings for the auto industry and other industrial firms, including the massive General Motors Building in midtown Detroit (the largest office building in the world when it opened in 1922), and the adjacent, opulent headquarters for Fisher Body. And he designed homes for auto executives, including lakefront mansions in Gross Pointe for Henry Joy and Henry Ford’s son, Edsel. He even designed the Henry Ford Hospital. The extraordinary productivity of his firm, which by the late 1920s had four hundred employees, and the rapidity with which it could complete designs, rested on a high degree of division of labor, with various departments performing specialized functions, an application to professional, white-collar work of some of the principles Ford perfected for manufacturing. To track work, Kahn’s firm used forms similar to those used by Ford at Highland Park.36
River Rouge
Even as Kahn’s practice grew, Henry Ford remained his most important client. Together they designed what became the next flagship of industrial giantism, Ford’s River Rouge plant. Almost as soon as the New Shop was completed, Ford began planning a much larger complex in nearby Dearborn, buying massive tracts of land. Some was used for Ford endeavors besides the car company, including a separate firm that produced Fordson tractors. But most of it was devoted to making the Model T. Ford decided to advance to the extreme his effort at vertical integration, seeking to make not only parts but also basic materials like steel, glass, and rubber for his cars, eliminating the possibility of suppliers raising prices or not fulfilling orders when inventories were tight. The Dearborn property, along the Rouge River, allowed the direct delivery of bulk goods, including iron ore, coal, and sand, from Great Lakes ships and had plenty of water for industrial processes. Also, the sparsely populated Dearborn suburb gave Ford greater control over his environment than Detroit, with its heterogeneous population and episodic labor activism.37
Ford began constructing a blast furnace at River Rouge in 1917. It was followed by a series of other processing plants, including coke ovens, open-hearth furnaces, a rolling mill, a glass factory, a rubber and tire plant, a leather plant, a paper mill, a box factory, and a textile mill. Ford put great effort into integrating the various plants and reusing byproducts. Impurities from the blast furnaces, for example, were sent to an on-site factory to be made into cement. Ford also began buying coal and iron mines and vast tracts of forest land in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where he built sawmills, kilns, and factories to make wooden parts for the Model T. Sawdust and scrap lumber were used to make the charcoal briquettes, sold under the Kingsford brand, which to this day fuel barbecues and family happiness across America. His grandest effort at backward integration was a vast rubber plantation in the Amazon Basin that proved a costly failure.38
Complete Model Ts were never produced at River Rouge, which initially served as a feeder plant for Highland Park. Engines, tires, windows, and other components were taken from the Rouge to Highland Park for final assembly. But with the high volume of Model T production, even the feeder operations were vast. The River Rouge foundry, where engine blocks were cast from molten iron conveyed from adjacent blast furnaces, was the largest in the world, employing ten thousand men.39
When final assembly operations did begin at the Rouge, it was, ironically, to make boats, not cars. During World War I, Henry Ford contracted with the Navy to build 112 submarine chasers using assembly-line methods. The Navy paid for a new plant to produce them, the “B Building,” designed by Kahn. Freestanding, it was the largest factory ever built, 300 feet wide and 1,700 feet—a third-of-a-mile—long, a huge shed with walls composed almost entirely of windows. As tall as a three-story building but open inside to accommodate boat production, it was designed to allow the later addition of intermediate floors. When the last of the Eagle Boats left the building in September 1919 (none were completed in time to be used in combat), floors were added and the building was used to assemble Model T bodies, which previously had been purchased from outside contractors.
The B Building represented the beginning of a shift in factory design principles for Ford and Kahn, moving away from the ingenuous architectural machine that they had just developed at the New Shop. Kahn helped lead not one but two revolutions in industrial architecture. Rather than multistory buildings, at the Rouge Kahn and Ford erected very large single-story factories to avoid the cost of hoisting materials and to allow bigger uninterrupted spaces, since columns to support upper floors were no longer needed. The expansive, open areas gave engineers flexibility in machine placement, aided by the company decision to stop using overhead shafts and belts to power machinery, instead deploying individual electric motors. Single-story plants also avoided the need to punch holes between floors when assembly lines were repositioned. In 1923, Ford switched its standard design for branch plants from multistory to single-story as well.
With the move to single-story factories, Kahn abandoned reinforced concrete, no longer needing its vibration dampening qualities. Instead he used steel frames, which allowed structures to be put up more quickly and expanded more easily. Kahn’s new buildings had, if anything, even more glass on the walls than his earlier structures, and he generally used roof monitors—raised structures with glass facing in varied directions—rather than sawtooth roofs, which provided more diffuse natural light.
The loft-style, concrete buildings Kahn helped popularize continued to be built for manufacturing and storage. Resistant to water damage and strongly constructed, they can be found in large numbers in older American industrial districts, sometimes still used for manufacturing, sometimes abandoned, sometimes converted to warehouses or offices, and occasionally turned into trendy apartments. But Kahn himself almost never returned to the style.
Instead, Kahn embraced sleek surfaces of glass and metal in buildings both functional and beautiful. Over the course of two decades, he created a bounty of industrial buildings of great modernist design—clean, light, spare, seemingly endless. Many of Kahn’s Rouge buildings were expressions of almost pure form—tall cylindrical chimneys, long glass walls, shapely monitor roofs—unsullied by ornamentation. The Engineering Laboratory, completed in 1925, where Henry Ford had his office, had a particularly striking interior, with a long central space flanked by smaller galleries, with two levels of monitor windows on both sides flooding it with light. Some of Kahn’s later designs, like his Chrysler Half-Ton Truck Plant, are widely recognized as among the greatest industrial buildings ever erected, modernist masterpieces.
Yet neither Kahn nor Ford thought of themselves as modernists. In a 1931 speech, Kahn gave a nuanced but largely negative appraisal of modernist architecture. Kahn criticized the extreme functionalism and lack of ornamentation of architects like Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier (arguably traits that characterized his own factory designs). “What we call modernism today is largely affectation, a seeking for the radical, the extreme.” In his nonindustrial projects, Kahn drew on a variety of historical styles, designing often handsome but rarely pathbreaking buildings. Henry Ford was even more explicitly antimodernist at the very moment he was creating a new industrial modernity. Concurrent with the creation of the Rouge, he continued to add to his collection of old machines, furniture, and buildings, which he eventually installed in Greenfield Village, near the Rouge plant, a recreation of an earlier, small-town America. Even as his cars and factories promoted urbanization and cosmopolitanism, Ford remained deeply nostalgic about the parochial, rural world he grew up in and chose to leave.
Buildings continued to be added at the Rouge all through the 1920s and 1930s. The Press Shop, completed in the late 1930s, became the largest single factory building in the world, with a floor area of 1,450,000 square feet. Ford spaced the Rouge buildings far apart to allow for later expansion, having plenty of room on the 1,096-acre site. An elaborate system of rail lines, roads, 142 miles of conveyors, monorails, and an elevated “High Line” with an automatic transport system moved raw materials, parts, and subassemblies within and between buildings. Employee parking lots ringed the vast, isolated complex, but many workers arrived at special streetcar and bus terminals. Fences, railroad tracks, and guarded gates restricted access to the plant, which came to resemble a fortress, in contrast to Highland Park, which was situated in a busy urban neighborhood, with public sidewalks alongside the factory buildings.40
Ironically, while the Rouge was being built out to produce everything needed to make a Model T, the car itself was becoming obsolete. By the mid-1920s, other car companies, including General Motors and Chrysler, had introduced more technically advanced and varied models than Ford, which still only sold the Model T (though it offered luxury cars under the Lincoln nameplate). By 1927, as sales diminished, it became evident that something had to be done. Abruptly, Ford stopped making the Model T, even before finalizing the design of its replacement, the Model A. For six months, Ford factories sat idle, while the company replaced 15,000 machine tools and rebuilt 25,000 more. New molds, jigs, dies, fixtures, gauges, and assembly sequences had to be created. Meanwhile, the layoff of 60,000 Detroit-area Ford workers created a social crisis, as relief agencies, free clinics, and child-placement agencies struggled to meet the huge demand for their services.
The underbelly of the Ford system had been exposed. Extreme standardization had allowed other companies to win over consumers on the basis of style and change, what General Motors president Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., called “the ‘laws’ of Paris dressmakers . . . in the automobile industry.” Single-purpose, specialized machinery, which made it inexpensive to produce particular parts, made it expensive to switch over to new products (a problem that went all the way back to the high-speed but inflexible machinery used in the early Lowell mills). The changeover from the Model T to the Model A cost the Ford Motor Company $250 million ($3.5 billion in 2017 currency) and first place in sales to General Motors. Vertical integration had its downside, too, evident when the economy and auto sales tanked just a few years after the introduction of the Model A; Ford had a harder time cutting costs than the other major automakers, which bought most of their parts from outside suppliers. Over the course of the decade starting in 1927, Ford had a cumulative net loss, while General Motors made nearly $2 billion in after-tax profits.
The introduction of the Model A completed the transfer of the center of the Ford empire from Highland Park to River Rouge. The final assembly line for the new car was set up in the B Building, which was so large that it also could house at various times an assembly line for Fordson tractors, a trade school, fire department, and hospital. The geographical move was accompanied by a purge of pioneer Ford engineers and executives, most of those remaining from the team that had created the Model T, the assembly line, and the Ford system. With Harry Bennett and Charles Sorenson, a long-time, very tough Ford production manager, effectively running the Rouge, an autocratic, chaotic, and brutal culture came to characterize the plant. Workers decried harsh discipline for petty offenses, arbitrary, ever-changing rules, and tyrannical foremen. One Rouge worker complained that “The bosses are thick as treacle and they’re always on your neck, because the man above is on their neck and Sorenson’s on the neck of the whole lot—he’s the man that pours the boiling oil down that old Henry makes. . . . A man checks ’is brains and ’is freedom at the door when he goes to work at Ford’s.”
The Rouge—“that self-sufficing industrial cosmos, a masterpiece of ingenuity and efficiency,” Edmund Wilson called it—embodied an extreme strategy of industrial concentration. Ford set up dozens of branch plants in the United States to assemble kits of parts shipped from Highland Park and later Dearborn, but manufacturing remained highly centralized at the major complexes. During the 1920s and 1930s, the company built a series of “village industry” factories in rural southeastern Michigan. Powered by small hydroelectric dams, the plants produced small parts for use at Highland Park and the Rouge—starter switches, drill bits, ignition coils, and the like. Henry Ford conceived of the plants as providing work for farmers during the slack winter season. Again, as at Greenfield Village, he seemed to be embracing an idealized vision of a decentralized Jeffersonian society, even as his life’s work undermined it. But with a combined workforce at their height of only some four thousand workers, the village factories were not much more than an ideological gesture in the shadow of the giant Ford plants.
Other automakers also built very large plants. The complexity of manufacturing an automobile, with its hundreds of different parts; the cost of transporting bulky components like frames, axles, motors, and bodies; and the heavy investment needed to build and equip an automobile plant made concentration of production a widely shared strategy. The Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck (an independent enclave within Detroit) began as a parts supplier for Ford, but the Dodge Brothers later expanded it to produce their own car. Albert Kahn designed the first buildings; Smith, Hinchman, & Grylls, another Detroit architectural firm, many additional buildings, most of them multistory structures made of reinforced concrete. Under the Dodges and later Chrysler, which bought the company after its founders’ deaths, the factory became a fully integrated manufacturing and assembly plant, larger in floor space than Highland Park, its nearest equivalent. It had some 30,000 workers in the late 1930s and even more during World War II, remaining in operation until 1980. General Motors became famous for its divisional structure and decentralization, but in Flint, Michigan, it, too, had a huge production complex, several really. In the late 1920s, the gigantic Buick plant (yet another Kahn design) had 22,000 workers; a cluster of Chevrolet factories employed 18,000 workers; Fisher Body, by then a GM subsidiary, had 7,500 workers; and still more workers could be found in the factories of AC Spark Plug, another GM subsidiary.
But nothing touched the Rouge in sheer scale. Historian Lindy Biggs characterized it as “more like an industrial city than a factory.” In 1925 it had 52,800 workers, still trailing Highland Park, where the workforce had swelled to 55,300. With the Model A, though, the Rouge moved ahead. It peaked at 102,811 workers in 1929, a level of employment entirely unprecedented at a single factory complex. To this day, at least in terms of the size of its workforce, it remains unmatched in the United States. It was, simply, the largest and most complicated factory ever built, an extraordinary testament to ingenuity, engineering, and human labor.41
Celebrating Ford
Ford methods attracted widespread interest among industrial professionals as soon as they were introduced. Henry Ford welcomed reporters, especially from the technical press, into his factories, openly sharing details about his latest innovations, a departure from the usual wariness among manufacturers about releasing information about their techniques. Trade journals like American Machinist, Iron Age, and Engineering Magazine ran extensive articles about the methods developed to produce the Model T. Other American automobile companies and consumer goods manufacturers quickly adopted the assembly line.42
The general public was likewise fascinated by the Ford system, especially the assembly line. Henry Ford realized that public interest in the methods of making Ford cars could help sell them. In addition to providing tours of the Highland Park plant, he took the assembly line on the road. At the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, just two years after the assembly line had been introduced, a Ford exhibit included a working production line that turned out twenty Model Ts a day. When in 1928 Ford unveiled the Model A at Madison Square Garden, the company put up displays of every facet of the production process, from dioramas of Ford iron and coal mines to workstations for making glass and upholstery. At the 1933–34 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition, part of the Ford Exposition Building, designed by Albert Kahn and later moved near the entrance to the Rouge plant, showed “the complete production of the car in all its parts.” In 1938, nearly a million people visited the display. And they flocked to the Rouge itself, too. In the late 1930s, Ford offered a two-hour tour of the complex starting every half hour. Other manufacturing firms, including Chrysler and General Motors, also opened their plants and set up exhibits for a public endlessly fascinated with how things were made, especially with the complex, wondrous choreography of the assembly line. The Kahn-designed General Motors Exhibit at the Chicago Exposition featured a model production line, which allowed visitors on an overlooking balcony to watch workers assembling vehicles.
The public romance with the giant factory and the assembly line proved long-lasting. In 1971, 243,000 people visited the Rouge, a record number. A few years later, the U.S. Department of Commerce published a list of plants in the United States that offered tours. It ran to 149 pages, with everything from distilleries to steel mills, including a dozen auto plants.43
Intellectuals and political activists were caught up in the allure of Fordism, too. Perhaps surprisingly, given Ford’s later reputation as a union-hating, conservative autocrat, some prominent leftists at first praised the Ford system. In early 1916, after visiting the Highland Park plant, Kate Richards O’Hare, a well-known socialist leader, published two articles in The National Rip-Saw, a mass circulation socialist monthly, praising Henry Ford. O’Hare saw the Five Dollar Day, the Sociological Department, and the Ford English School as advancing the lot of workers (along with Ford’s decision to take the power to fire away from foremen). Using a jarringly racist simile, she wrote that as a result of Ford’s policies “men freeze to a job in the Ford plant like a negro to a fat possum.” “If every Capitalist in the United States were to suddenly become converted to Ford’s ideas . . . it would not solve the social problems, eliminate the class struggle or inaugurate the co-operative commonwealth, BUT it would advance the cause of social justice, demonstrate the soundness of the socialist theories and bring the mighty pressure of education to hasten the final and complete emancipation of the working class.”44
Later that same year, John Reed, soon to be the most important chronicler of the Russian Revolution and a founder of the American Communist Party, wrote a similarly glowing if more sophisticated portrait of Ford in the left-wing journal The Masses. Ford’s strategy of low prices and high wages, especially the profit-sharing built into the Five Dollar Day, for Reed represented a huge step forward from normal industrial practices. Reed detailed the difference high wages made in the lives of Ford workers. Beyond that, after interviewing Ford, he came to believe that the auto giant was moving toward some sort of new form of corporate control that would give workers a say; the Five Dollar Day was “turning into something dangerously like a real experiment in democracy, and from it may spring a real menace to capitalism.” This was why, Reed believed, “capitalists hate Henry Ford,” an echo of Ford’s own perception of himself, in the Populist idiom he grew up around, as a producer of value having to fight off the parasitic financiers of Wall Street.45
Left-wing praise for Henry Ford diminished over time, in part in response to changes in his company’s practices and his rabid anti-Semitism during the 1920s; Edmund Wilson, writing fifteen years after Reed, dubbed him the “despot of Dearborn.” But Fordism struck a strong chord with a group that during the New Deal would ally with elements of the left, businessmen and their supporters who saw mass consumption as critical to maintaining prosperity and profits. Edward Filene, who made his money in department stores, was perhaps the most outspoken member of those who have been dubbed “proto-Keynesians” for seeing the need for mass purchasing power to maintain economic growth. Unlike in the past, Filene wrote in 1924, businesses needed to produce “prosperous customers as well as saleable goods.” Fordism, with its promise of high wages and cheaper products, was a way to create a virtuous circle of mass purchasing power, mass consumption, mass production, and economic growth. Unlike O’Hare and Reed, Filene acknowledged the monotony of Fordist labor, but saw shorter hours as partially ameliorating the problem. And, in any case, “every man is not an artist, every man is not a creative craftsman.” “Poverty brings a monotony a thousand times more deadly to body and mind than the monotony of factory routine,” he added in a comment reminiscent of W. Cooke Taylor’s remark about child labor eighty years earlier.46
Novelists, too, saw in Fordism a startling development, a step into a new type of world. John Dos Passos profiled Ford in The Big Money (1936), which concluded his great three-volume portrait of the country, U.S.A., writing not only about the Model T and the exhausting labor used to produce it but also the automaker’s many contradictions, his pacifism, war profiteering, and anti-Semitism, his revolutionary inventions and antiquarianism. (Alfred Kazin shrewdly observed that U.S.A., with its complex structure composed of different types of narrative building blocks, was itself a “tool,” “another American invention—an American thing peculiar to the opportunity and stress of American life.”)47 Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who visited a Detroit Ford factory in 1926, included a scene of working on the company assembly line in Journey to the End of the Night (1932). Upton Sinclair wrote a not very good novel about Ford, The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America (1937). And most famously, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) depicts a dystopia of Fordism, a portrait of life A.F.—the years “Anno Ford,” measured from 1908, when the Model T was introduced—with Henry Ford the deity.48
Dos Passos, Sinclair, Céline, and Huxley all wrote about Ford and Fordism during the 1930s, well after the initial burst of journalistic and industrial excitement over mass production. Their work was colored by the Great Depression and the Ford Motor Company’s violent antiunion actions, which radically changed the public image of Ford and the Fordist project. By contrast, the key visual depictions of Fordism began earlier, during the 1920s. More than in the written word, it was in the visual arts that Fordism and the giant factory were celebrated.
Giant Factories and the Visual Arts
Factories had been portrayed from their earliest days in drawings, lithographs, and paintings. But only in the twentieth century did the factory become an important subject for artists. It is difficult to think of a truly great eighteenth- or nineteenth-century artistic representation of a factory, but there are plenty of great twentieth-century factory paintings, photographs, and films. For many artists during the 1920s and 1930s, the factory represented modern life—secular, urban, mechanical, overwhelming—a break from the rural landscape or intimate domestic interior. And it provided a vehicle for modernist modes of artistic representation, moving toward abstraction. While in the nineteenth century, novelists and other writers played a major role in shaping public perceptions of the factory and the factory system, in the twentieth century, visual artists came to the fore.
Photography, in particular, took the lead in influencing public perceptions of the giant factory. Itself a product of the Industrial Revolution that created the factory system, photography allowed the easy reproduction and dissemination of imagery, while painting remained an inherently elite form, largely created for private viewing by collectors or museum goers. It was fitting that photography and film, so well suited to the creation of unlimited identical products, proved the most important media for the representation of mass production.
Early in the twentieth century, a number of American photographers, including Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, and Alvin Langdon Coburn, began taking pictures of machinery, machine parts, and industrial landscapes. By the 1920s, photographers and artists elsewhere—purists in France, futurists in Italy, Bauhaus affiliates and Neue Sachlichkeit photographers in Germany, constructivists in the Soviet Union—also had turned to industry for visual ideas, symbols, and a machine aesthetic.49 But photographing actual factories, especially their interiors, presented formidable technical problems in an era of large, heavy cameras, a limited choice of lenses, slow film, and primitive lighting devices. The photographer who first overcame many of the challenges and did more than any other to disseminate images of giant industry was Margaret Bourke-White.
Bourke-White’s father, an engineer and inventor, worked for a printing press manufacturer. He often took Margaret, while a child living in New Jersey, to the plants where presses were being made or installed. She later wrote of the first time he took her to a foundry, “I can hardly describe my joy. To me at that age, a foundry represented the beginning and end of all beauty.” Her lifelong fascination with industry was linked to her intense feelings for her father, who died when she was only eighteen. “I worshipped my father,” she wrote. “Whenever I go on a job, I always see machinery through my father’s eyes. And so I worship factories.”
Bourke-White moved to Cleveland in the mid-1920s to try to make a go of it as an architectural photographer, documenting upscale homes and gardens. But she found herself drawn to the Flats, the smoky, dirty, noisy district in the heart of the city that housed heavy industry. “Fresh from college with my camera over my shoulder, the Flats were photographic paradise.”
Soon Bourke-White was selling exterior shots of industry to a local bank for its house publication. But getting inside factories was another story; Cleveland industrialists, like most factory owners, had no interest in allowing outsiders inside. Her break came when the head of Otis Steel gave her access to his mill. With a confidence beyond her years, she pronounced to him “that there is a power and vitality in industry that makes it a magnificent subject for photography, that it reflects the age in which we live.” She had come to believe that “Industry . . . had evolved an unconscious beauty—often a hidden beauty that was waiting to be discovered.”
After five months of experimenting with camera positions, lighting, film, and darkroom technique, Bourke-White managed to capture the drama of molten steel being poured. Otis Steel bought her prints, and other industrial commissions began coming her way. For the stage set of Eugene O’Neill’s play Dynamo, she photographed the generators at the Niagara Falls Power Company. Years later, when she reprinted the image, she wrote in the caption, “Dynamos were more beautiful to me than pearls,” quite a statement for a woman devoted to stylish looks and expensive clothes.50
In 1929, Henry Luce, the publisher of Time, hired Bourke-White for his new business publication, Fortune. A lavish, heavily illustrated magazine, with some of the top writers and designers in the country, Fortune provided sophisticated documentation, celebration, and analysis of American business. Its photographers, including Bourke-White, had access to the largest and most advanced industrial complexes in the country. In 1930, she photographed the Rouge. Four years later, she took pictures at Amoskeag Mills, where years earlier Lewis Hine had photographed child workers.
Bourke-White’s audience expanded exponentially when Luce shifted her to his new “photo-magazine,” Life. The cover of the first issue, dated November 23, 1936, was a Bourke-White photograph of the spillway of the world’s largest earth-filled dam, the Fort Peck Dam in eastern Montana, a masterpiece of formal, nearly abstract composition and human-dwarfing scale. Within months, Life was selling a million copies a week, with Bourke-White one of its stars.
In her early industrial photographs, Bourke-White displayed little interest in workers. Often they are totally absent. When present, they seem negligible compared to the huge structures and machines that dominate her pictures. This effacing of workers from industrial imagery was a common characteristic of photographs and paintings during the 1920s and early 1930s (in Europe as well as the United States), a sharp contrast to the earlier work of Hine. Though Hine sometimes showed machines dwarfing humans, emphasizing their large scale and abstract shapes, the bulk of his work centered on the human experience of labor, on the faces, bodies, and expressions of the workers who inhabited the industrial realm. For Bourke-White, at this stage of her career, it was not the worker who held her interest, nor the products being made, but the abstract forms of industry. “Beauty of Industry,” she wrote in 1930, “lies in its truth and simplicity.”51
Charles Sheeler, who beat Bourke-White to the Rouge, shared her credo. “I speak in the tongue of my times,” he said in 1938, “the mechanical, the industrial. Anything that works efficiently is beautiful.” “Our Factories,” he declared, “are our substitutes for religious expression.” A precisionist painter from Philadelphia, whose early work included the magnificent, abstracted urban landscapes Church Street El (1920) and Skyscrapers (1922), Sheeler took up photography as a way to support himself while painting. His commercial work included photographs for a Philadelphia advertising agency, N. W. Ayer & Son, which the Ford Motor Company engaged to promote the introduction of the Model A. Vaughn Flannery, the Ayer art director, working with Ford, decided to sell the new car by portraying the giant machines and factories used to manufacture it. Flannery sent Sheeler off to the Rouge, where he spent six weeks producing an extraordinary portfolio of images. Most of the photographs depict steelmaking and stamping processes, with their giant equipment and elemental drama. There are no photographs of assembly operations. Many of the images appear nearly abstract, with chimneys, conveyors, pipes, and cranes cutting across the picture plane, often at dramatic angles. Workers are entirely absent in many photographs and barely visible, at the edges of the frame, in others. As in some of Bourke-White’s photographs, when humans are present they serve to make evident the massive scale of the equipment and buildings near them (not dissimilar to the relationship between man and machine in illustrations of the Corliss engine at the Centenary Exhibition).
Figure 4.3 Charles Sheeler’s striking photograph of the Ford River Rouge factory, Criss-Crossed Conveyors—Ford Plant, 1927.
“The Flannery Ford campaign,” wrote architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson, “was the first to portray a beauty and heroism in the manufacturing process in order to spur sales. The Rouge ads started a fad, as many advertisers found that industrial views could be used in popular, mass-circulation magazines as well as in trade journals.” Flannery shrewdly realized that the giant factory, with its Promethean grandeur, represented a modernity with which consumers would want to associate themselves.52
While Ford made use of Sheeler’s Rouge photographs for advertising, some were presented as art objects. Sheeler himself used them in a photomontage exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. He also produced a series of paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints of the Rouge. The best-known paintings, American Landscape and Classic Landscape, were not studies of individual factory buildings but vistas of the complex. Both realistic and abstract in their concentration on form, line, and light, the near absence of people in Sheeler’s depictions of an industrial plant which had tens of thousands of workers gives an eerie air to the paintings. The critic Leo Marx wrote of American Landscape that Sheeler “eliminated all evidence of the frenzied movement and clamor we associate with the industrial scene. . . . This ‘American Landscape’ is the industrial landscape pastoralized.”
In depicting few people on the Rouge site, Sheeler was being literal. Other observers noted that, counterintuitively, very few people could be seen outside the factory buildings in many parts of the highly mechanized complex. But Sheeler also was making choices about what to depict. After World War II, he did a series of paintings of the by then-shuttered Amoskeag Mills. Hine’s Amoskeag photographs portrayed young workers. Bourke-White’s captured the symmetry and repetitive patterns of the machinery. Sheeler’s Amoskeag paintings were again landscapes, with no person in sight.53
Art historian Terry Smith criticized Bourke-White and Sheeler for “banishing productive labor, excluding the human, implying an autonomy to the mechanical, then seeking a beauty of repetition, simplicity, regularity of rhythm, clarity of surface. This is the gaze of management at leisure, marveling at the new beauties which its organizational inventiveness can create.” Smith has a point. After all, Bourke-White’s first clients were business leaders who wanted beautiful images of the buildings and facilities they controlled, before she moved on to a broader audience of business readers at Fortune. Edsel Ford bought Classic Landscape. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., bought American Landscape.54
But to leave it there is to miss the greatness of this art. Bourke-White’s subject was not the control of industry by capital; it was the grandeur of the structures of industry and the processes of production. Her photographs celebrate the power and creativity of humanity as manifested in industrial forms and the transformation of intractable materials. In her early work, the creations of workers effaced the workers themselves or at least diminished them. But over time, her interest in workers and the impact of industry on them grew. For Fortune, she photographed not only factories but skilled artisans, laborers, and industrial workers. At the Rouge, she had groups of workers informally pose for her. Her cover story for the first issue of Life documented not only the Fort Peck Dam but also the boomtown that grew up for the workers building it. One of her most striking images is of workers relaxing at a local bar. Her 1938 Life photographs of a Plymouth factory documented men at work.55
In his Rouge photographs, Sheeler was even more concerned with form and geometry than Bourke-White, creating stunning formal compositions (some of which did include workers). He, too, had a central concern with power, as Fortune recognized when it commissioned him to create six paintings on the theme for its December 1940 issue. But if Sheeler’s industrial photographs have a cool, triumphal feel, his industrial paintings, with their near absence of humanity, have a melancholy air, reminiscent of Edward Hopper in their light, treatment of shadow, and emotional tenor. These are far deeper and more ambiguous images than simple celebrations of possession.56
During the 1920s and 1930s, other painters besides Sheeler found a rich subject in large-scale industry, many lumped together under the label of precisionism, including Elsie Driggs (who did a painting of the Rouge in 1928), Charles Demuth, and Louis Lozowick. Lozowick, a self-conscious leftist who had extensive contact with the European and Soviet avant-garde, defended the portrayal of industrial machinery “more as a prognostication than as a fact” of the time when “rationalization and economy” would be “allies of the working class in the building of socialism.” Other painters, like Stuart Davies and Gerald Murphy, adopted what has been dubbed a “machine aesthetic,” though they never made industrial structures themselves their subject. But the artist who best captured the world of heavy industry, and the Rouge in particular, was not a precisionist but rather a Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera.57
Diego Rivera and Detroit Industry
Automaking turned Detroit into a boomtown. As workers poured in to take factory jobs, the population more than tripled, from 466,000 in 1910 to 1,720,000 in 1930, and the city sprawled. The newly enriched industrial captains built their mansions in lakeside suburbs and took it upon themselves to endow the city with the civic and cultural institutions that mark centers of power. Among them was the Detroit Institute of Arts, owned by the city but overseen by a small board, which was headed by Edsel Ford and included Albert Kahn and Charles T. Fisher of Fisher Body.58 In 1930, the ambitious museum director, William Valentiner, commissioned Diego Rivera to paint two murals in the courtyard of its new building. The artist, already well known in international art circles, at the time was working on his first murals in the United States. Valentiner convinced Edsel Ford, whom he tutored in art history, to finance the project.
By the time Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo, arrived in Detroit in April 1932, it was a very different place than when Sheeler had taken his photographs five years earlier. The Depression had hit the city hard, with mass unemployment in the auto industry and severe deprivation in the working-class neighborhoods. Radical movements had swelled, demanding jobs, relief, and unionization. On March 7, 1932, Ford guards and Dearborn police opened fire on a march of unemployed workers and their supporters, killing four and wounding many others. A funeral procession for the slain attracted sixty thousand marchers.
Though a self-identified Marxist and sometimes communist, Rivera (and Kahlo, too) seemed oblivious to the ferocious class conflict. Instead, he was entranced by Henry Ford and the industrial empire he had built. “My childhood passion for mechanical toys,” he later wrote, “had been transformed to a delight in machinery for its own meaning for man—his self-fulfillment and liberation from drudgery and poverty.” Rivera admired the photographs of industrial equipment that Kahlo’s father, a prominent Mexican photographer, had taken. The artist toured a variety of Detroit-area factories, but like for so many others it was the Rouge that captured his imagination and became the centerpiece of his work. Rivera grew so enthusiastic that Valentiner and Edsel Ford agreed to enlarge the commission to cover all four walls of the museum courtyard (at double the original fee), with twenty-seven panels providing space for a huge pictorial program, which, in accordance with Edsel’s wish, included not only the Rouge but also scenes from other locally important industries.59
Figure 4.4 Left to right: Albert Kahn, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera at the Detroit Institute of Arts on December 10, 1932.
Rivera completed the murals in mid-March 1933, the very low point of the Great Depression. While he and his assistants had worked on them from heavy scaffolding, groups of visitors had watched, much like the tourists at River Rouge, whom Rivera incorporated into one of his panels. Even before they were unveiled, the murals were subject to attacks of all kinds. But they proved immensely popular—thousands came the first week to see them—and they have remained one of Detroit’s premier attractions ever since.60
Detroit Industry is one of the triumphs of twentieth-century art, the most fully realized visual representation we have of the factory system. The two largest panels depict with remarkable visual compression the complex process of automobile manufacturing at the Rouge. The north wall panel shows the production of transmission housings and V8 engines (just recently introduced by Ford), from the blast furnace through casting, drilling, and assembly. The south wall portrays the stamping and finishing of steel car bodies and the final assembly line. Visually dense, with conveyors, pipes, cranes, and balconies serpenting through the panels, Rivera’s Rouge, unlike Bourke-White’s or Sheeler’s, teems with people: workers toiling, supervisors and tourists watching, and Henry and Edsel Ford, Valentiner, Rivera himself, and—thrown in for good measure—Dick Tracy all standing by.61
Figure 4.5 A detail from the north wall of Detroit Industry, a series of frescoes completed by Diego Rivera in 1933.
As remarkable as the Rouge panels are, they are only part of a larger array, epic in its conceptual and visual sweep. Other panels depict the miracle of modern medicine, the constructive and destructive sides of the aviation and chemical industries, huge figures representing each of the races, fruits and vegetables illustrating the bounty of the earth, and even the earth itself, with its stratifications and fossils and a fetus within it. While most of the Rouge workers have the faces and bodies of European Americans or African Americans, other figures, including two remarkable giant portraits of nude women representing the bounty of agriculture (in the upper corners of the east wall) are indigenous Mexicans in face and body, a fusion of two countries and two cultures in Rivera’s vision of modernity.
Human labor and machines co-dominate the Rivera mural. The toll that Fordism took on workers is evident in a predella panel of their tired bodies trudging across an overpass on their way home. But in its totality, the mural celebrates the strength of man and machine, the power seized from nature by mankind and harnessed in the giant factory.
Only in one tiny detail does an explicit critique of Ford appear, a hat worn by one worker that reads “We Want,” no doubt a reference to the union movement then gaining power in Detroit and ferociously resisted by the company. Rivera, though, could not contain his disdain for capital (though not for the Fords, father and son, whose company he seemed to genuinely enjoy). As soon as he finished Detroit Industry, he headed to New York to create a mural in the newly completed Rockefeller Center. His refusal to remove portraits of Lenin and of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., with a drink in hand and women nearby led the Rockefellers to destroy the work.
Rivera also had been commissioned to create a mural entitled Forge and Foundry for the Kahn-designed General Motors exhibit at the upcoming Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago. The architect, who initially had not been enthusiastic about commissioning the Rivera murals at the Institute of Art, had come to strongly defend them. But after the Rockefeller Center controversy, General Motors ordered him to fire Rivera. Kahn promised the artist to “do my best to get permission for you to proceed,” but the auto company did not relent. Rivera told the press, “This is a blow to me. I wanted to paint men and machinery.” Returning to Mexico, he hardly ever did again. Fordism and the giant factory lost their greatest chronicler.62
Ironically, and tellingly, today the most widely seen image of the Rouge in high culture is probably neither the Rivera murals nor Sheeler’s work but a painting by Frida Kahlo. When she came with Rivera to Detroit, Kahlo was almost completely unknown as an artist, but while in the city she produced a number of works that eventually came to overshadow Rivera’s mural in the global art world, just as her overall reputation came to overshadow his. In her best-known work of the period, the extraordinary painting Henry Ford Hospital, the Rouge appears as visual and topical background to the central image of a bleeding Kahlo lying in bed after the miscarriage she had in Detroit (probably induced as an abortion). Among other things, her painting is a premonition of the shift of cultural interest in North America and Europe away from industry toward intensely personal, inward concerns.63
The Tramp in the Factory
In terms of sheer popularity, the premier visual representation of Fordism and the giant factory was not a painting or photograph at all, but Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times, released in 1936. Mass production had long fascinated the filmmaker, by then one of the country’s best-known celebrities. In 1923 he had visited Detroit, touring the Highland Park powerhouse and assembly line with Henry and Edsel Ford as his guides. Years later, trying to come up with a way to cinematically deal with the misery caused by the Great Depression and more broadly with the machine age, the Ford factory provided inspiration. In the last major silent film to be made in Hollywood, Chaplin utilized what already was an archaic technology to critique mass production, mass consumption, and the capitalist crisis. (The film has a sound track, but the only voices heard come from mechanical devices until, near the very end, we finally hear Chaplin’s voice, singing a nonsense song with no intelligible words.)
From the very first frame—a picture of a clock face—Chaplin presents the demands of industrial discipline. In a long early sequence, his character, the Tramp (his long-standing film persona, though in this film identified as “A Factory Worker”), works on an assembly line tightening bolts for a never-seen product. Funny and horrifying, the workers struggle to keep up with the line while the Tramp mischievously tries to subvert the system. The company president, from his office (where he is doing a jigsaw puzzle), can see everything in the factory, including the bathroom, through a television system (in real life then still in an experimental stage), which he uses to issue commands to speed up the line. The dehumanization of the worker in the service of productivity reaches its climax when the Tramp is used as a guinea pig for a machine designed to feed workers while they continue to work. It malfunctions, forcing bolts into the Tramp’s mouth and assaulting him with food and a mechanical mouth wiper. Soon, the endless repetitive motion of the assembly line has the Tramp uncontrollably twitching and eventually going mad, a comedic representation of the “Forditis” workers suffered when Ford introduced the assembly line.
As the film proceeds, it broadens out to encompass the ills of the whole society—mass unemployment, inequality, hunger, labor unrest, and heartless government authorities. The Tramp returns for a second stint in the factory, this time as a mechanic’s helper, to find himself literally dragged into the bowels of the machinery. Chaplin is not oblivious to the rewards of Fordism; at one point the Tramp, out of a job again because of a strike, and his companion, the beautiful Gamin played by Paulette Goddard, fantasizes life in a well-furnished worker’s bungalow, with modern appliances and a cow that furnishes milk on demand. But in the end, there is no satisfactory place for the Tramp and the Gamin in Modern Times, in the world of the giant factory. The film concludes with the couple walking down a rural road toward sunset and an unknown future, with a touch of hope provided by the final title, “Buck up—never say die. We’ll get along.”
Chaplin’s film is a critique of Depression-era capitalism, but it is also a critique of the fundamental characteristics of the mass-production factory. For Chaplin, the only solution to the soul-deadening drudgery and monotony of the giant factory is literally to walk away. In this regard, Modern Times is different and far more radical than the work of other left-wing chroniclers of the giant factory, including Rivera, who saw it as advancing humanity, even if, as Louis Lozowick had written, it might only be in the future that “rationalization and economy” would be “allies of the working class in the building of socialism.” Left-wing labor leader Louis Goldblatt told Chaplin his film was “Luddite.” Machines, Goldblatt asserted, were necessary for improving living standards of the working class.
At least publicly, though, the left largely applauded Modern Times. Chaplin had become friendly with Boris Shumyatsky, the head of the film industry in the Soviet Union, during his visit to the United States, and Shumyatsky’s public praise for the film made it hard for those in the communist orbit to do otherwise. (A Daily Worker review did say that in Modern Times “machinery turns out to be a gadget for comic use, like a trick cigar.”) Much of the mainstream press hailed the film as a triumphant comeback for Chaplin, who had not made a movie for five years.
As Edward Newhouse noted in Partisan Review, few critics, even as they praised him, acknowledged Chaplin’s radical message. Modern Times became a favorite of the cineastes and leftists for decades. It was shown in cinemas in the Soviet Union and, after the Cuban Revolution, when mobile projection crews brought motion pictures to remote villages where they had never been seen, the first film they showed was Modern Times. But communist leaders, like capitalists, had no desire to walk away from factory modernity, the way the Tramp did in Chaplin’s masterpiece. To the contrary, at the very moment the film premiered, the Soviet Union was well into a crash industrialization program, building giant factories that used Ford methods, even as in the United States workers were finally finding a way to tame them. 64
Unionizing Mass Production
“Jesus Christ, it’s like the end of the world.” So mouthed a tirebuilder at the huge Firestone tire factory in Akron, at 2 a.m. on January 29, 1936, when the workers began one of the first major sit-down strikes in American history. It was a chilling moment, as Ruth McKenney reconstructed it in her book Industrial Valley, when a tirebuilder pulled a handle to shut down the production line:
With this signal, in perfect synchronization, with the rhythm they had learned in a great mass-production industry, the tirebuilders stepped back from their machines.
Instantly, the noise stopped. The whole room lay in perfect silence. . . . A moment ago there had been the weaving hands, the revolving wheels, the clanking belt, the moving hooks, the flashing tire tools. Now there was absolute stillness.
When the silence broke, the men began cheering. “We done it! We stopped the belt!” Then they sang “John Brown’s Body.” Out the windows they chorused “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.”65
It was like the end of the world, or at least the beginning of the end of the world of industrial autocracy that had been part and parcel of factory giantism. The great labor upheaval in the United States during the late 1930s and 1940s transformed the giant factory, the lives of industrial workers, their families and communities, and the nation itself. With unionization, an industrial system that had once brought so much misery now brought unprecedented working-class upward mobility, security, and well-being. The unionized giant factory helped create what many Americans look back at as a golden era of shared prosperity, when children did better than their parents and expected their children to do better than themselves.66
Workers had tried to unionize large-scale industry before the 1930s, but repeatedly they had been repulsed, unable to overcome the physical fortresses and financial resources of the giant manufacturing concerns. But by the mid-1930s conditions had changed. The Great Depression robbed big business and its allies of political legitimacy and popular support. Financially pressed, companies eliminated many of the welfare programs they had introduced in the early twentieth century. Wage cuts, speedup, and layoffs further angered workers. Various left-wing groups, though small, provided ideas and leaders to disaffected workers, by this time less divided by ethnicity and language as a result of the restrictions on immigration that came during and after World War I. And crucially, the New Deal and its state-level equivalents provided symbolic and practical support for workers trying to unionize. In 1935, a group of veteran unionists, seeking to capitalize on the new circumstances, founded the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), dedicated to organizing the mass-production industries across the board, bringing skilled and unskilled workers into the same organizations.67
The largest industrial facilities, like the U.S. Steel plant in Gary and the main plants of the Big Three automakers—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—initially remained impervious to significant union gains. Instead, industrial workers generally first made organizational advances in smaller or peripheral plants. In the automobile industry, unions progressed among skilled tool- and die-makers; in parts plants, like Electric Auto-Lite in Toledo, Ohio, struck in 1934; and at smaller firms outside of the industry’s Michigan heartland, like White Motors in Cleveland and Studebaker in South Bend, Indiana. In the electrical-equipment industry, early labor success largely came at smaller companies, like Philco Radio in Philadelphia and Magnavox-Capehart in Fort Wayne, Indiana. At the number-two company, Westinghouse, unionists established a toehold at the East Springfield, Massachusetts, plant, but at the company’s giant East Pittsburgh facility, scene of bitter battles in earlier years, management maintained firm control. General Electric, the industry giant, had a more liberal labor policy, allowing small unions to start up at its giant complexes in Schenectady, New York, and Lynn, Massachusetts, but they had little real power.
By 1936, with an economic recovery under way and the CIO providing support, industrial unions began making progress even in some factory goliaths. In Akron, where the nation’s tire-making capacity was highly concentrated in a few large factories, a prolonged strike at Goodyear followed the Firestone sit-down. In the auto industry, the CIO-affiliated United Automobile Workers (UAW) began building a base in the General Motors empire.68
The UAW picked General Motors—which operated 110 factories and had more employees than any other manufacturing enterprise in the world—as its primary target in its effort to break into the Big Three. The contest between the infant union and what by some measures was the largest corporation anywhere seemed absurdly lopsided. But UAW organizers understood that a high degree of centralization and the tight integration of the company production processes left it vulnerable to a militant minority. In particular, only two sets of dies for making the bodies for the newest GM model existed, one in Cleveland and the other in Flint. Stopping those factories would shut down most of the company’s domestic car-making.
Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection in November 1936, in a campaign marked by sharp class rhetoric and massive labor support for the president, gave a boost to organizing efforts. UAW leaders hoped to launch a national strike against GM in early 1937, but outbreaks of worker militancy forced their hand sooner. In mid-November, workers at the GM plant in Atlanta began a sit-down strike. A month later, so did GM workers in Kansas City. Then, on December 28, workers in the GM plant in Cleveland sat down, too.
In Flint, the heart of the GM production system, after several years of effort the union still had signed up only a small minority of the forty thousand workers. But when on December 30 a union activist saw body dies being loaded to ship out, apparently to factories in areas with less union strength, the workers sat down in the small Fisher Body Plant No. 2 and the seven-thousand-worker Fisher Body No. 1, blocking the removal of the equipment. In the days that followed, workers at more GM plants in Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin followed suit. With the production of car bodies and other key components halted, within a week the whole GM national operation began grinding to a halt, with roughly half the workforce idled. The efficiencies and strategic advantages of the giant factory had come back to haunt the company, as a minority of workers, by seizing key choke points, leveraged power far beyond what one might expect from their modest numbers (which the sit-down tactic help disguise).
During the forty-four days strikers stayed inside the Flint plants, the giant factory turned from a site of managerial control to an arena of worker self-expression. The strikers organized themselves into committees in charge of overall leadership, security (including making sure no machinery was damaged), sanitation, and food. Makeshift sleeping quarters were built in car bodies and on factory floors, using car cushion stuffing to provide a touch of comfort. Cards, games, radio, Ping-Pong, and classes on labor history and parliamentary procedure helped ease the boredom and fear. So did dancers, theater troupes, and other sympathetic outsiders who entered the plants to provide entertainment.
The GM strike captured national attention, closely reported by newspapers, radio, and newsreels. The tense confrontation included an effort by company guards and Flint police to evict the occupiers of Fisher No. 2, repulsed by workers heaving heavy door hinges out second-story windows and training high-pressure water hoses on the police (who during their retreat opened fire on union backers); the mobilization of strikers’ wives and other family members to physically defend the occupied plants and provide the sit-downers with food and supplies; the seizure of an additional Flint plant, the gigantic Chevy No. 4 factory, which made every engine used in a Chevrolet; the mobilization of the Michigan National Guard, which surrounded the occupied factories; and, ultimately, negotiations involving GM officials, CIO President John L. Lewis, Michigan governor Frank Murphy, and federal officials, all the way up to President Roosevelt. The agreement that ended the strike, in itself, constituted but a modest union gain, a written company pledge that for six months it would recognize the UAW as the representative of its members in the struck plants. But as huge crowds cheered the haggard, bearded, smiling men who marched out of the occupied Flint plants, everyone knew that the world had changed; workers had shown that they could bring one of the most powerful corporations in the world to its knees by shutting down the giant factories in which they labored.69
The UAW victory set off a wave of strikes and union organization everywhere from giant factories to local retail stores. Nearly five million workers took part in walkouts during 1937, including four hundred thousand sit-downers. For its part, General Motors gave its workers a 5 percent pay hike and agreed with the UAW to a shop-steward system and the use of seniority in layoffs. Meanwhile, the auto union won agreements with smaller car companies, with parts makers, and, after a month-long sit-down in Dodge Main and six other factories, with Chrysler. In the electrical-equipment industry, the United Electrical Workers signed a contract with RCA covering the nearly ten thousand workers (three-quarters female) at its Camden, New Jersey, plant while General Electric agreed to a national contract that covered most of its largest plants, including its sprawling complex in Schenectady.70
The most remarkable breakthrough came in the steel industry, what Lewis called “the Hindenburg line of [American] industry.” Less than a week after the end of the General Motors strike, Lewis signed an agreement with Myron Taylor, the chairman of U.S. Steel, which granted workers a wage increase, the forty-hour week, time-and-a-half for overtime, and a grievance procedure. The CIO had created the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) to try to unionize the industry, but the going had been slow. Nonetheless, Taylor apparently decided that, given the union victory over GM and the pro-labor sentiment in Washington and in the statehouses of key steelmaking states, unionization was inevitable. Rather than allowing a prolonged battle that would mobilize the rank and file and perhaps interrupt production, Taylor cut a deal with Lewis, with no involvement of local activists or even SWOC leaders.71
As impressive as it was, the CIO offensive failed to sweep the field, as a number of key operators of very large industrial facilities successfully resisted unionization. The worst setback came in steel, as the so-called “Little Steel” companies, giants except in comparison with U.S. Steel, refused to recognize SWOC. In response, their workers walked out in late May 1937, but the strike ended in defeat; as in the past, the companies mobilized local governments, police, and the press against the strikers. Eighteen workers died during the battle, including ten shot by police during a peaceful protest in front of Republic Steel’s South Chicago mill. Just days earlier, when the UAW sent organizers to pass out leaflets outside the Rouge, they were set upon by Ford thugs and beaten mercilessly. Westinghouse, Goodyear, International Harvester, and, most importantly, Ford all dug in their heels and refused to sign contracts with the CIO, weakened as it was by the Little Steel defeat and a downward plunge of the economy that began in mid-1937. The victory of industrial unionism was not yet assured.72
But World War II allowed the American labor movement to complete the unionization of large-scale industry. Even before the United States entered the conflict, a defense buildup revived the economy, tightening labor markets and bolstering worker confidence. Also, the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which gave workers the right to join unions without reprisal and established a mechanism for their legal recognition, finally began forcing employers to change their ways. By late 1941, through a combination of legal challenges, worker mobilization, strikes, and federally supervised recognition elections, SWOC succeeded in organizing Little Steel. Westinghouse, International Harvester, Goodyear, and other holdouts fell to the CIO as well.73
The largest and symbolically most important victory came at Ford. In the fall of 1940, the UAW relaunched its stalled effort to organize the company. By the end of the year, the union had won substantial backing at the Rouge and a Lincoln plant in Detroit, filing for recognition elections. On April 1, 1941, a strike broke out at the Rouge after the company fired members of a union grievance committee in the rolling mill. As the number of strikers swelled, union leaders called a full-scale walkout at all Ford plants. To keep scabs out of the Rouge, with its immense perimeter, the strikers supplemented traditional picketing with a motorized encirclement of the plant and even aerial surveillance. In a reversal of the past pattern, Ford “servicemen” working for Harry Bennett found themselves being beat up by unionists. After ten days, the company agreed to end the strike by reinstating the fired workers and holding union recognition elections. At the Rouge, seventy-four thousand workers cast ballots in one of the largest such elections ever held, with 70 percent supporting the UAW. The union won decisive victories at Highland Park, the Lincoln plant, and other Ford factories as well. Then, in a startling and somewhat inexplicable move, the company agreed to one of the most generous contracts that any CIO union had achieved, including a provision that required all new employees to join the union, a checkoff of union dues (which the company took out of workers’ pay and gave to the union), disbanding Bennett’s Service Department, strengthened seniority and grievance systems, the rehiring, with back pay, of workers fired for union activity, and even allowing smoking in designated areas at the Highland Park and Lincoln plants, repudiating Henry Ford’s imposition of abstinence on his employees.74
The swelling of the union movement continued during the war itself. To check inflation, the federal government kept wage rates at prewar levels, but gave unions a boost by granting them “maintenance of membership,” requiring all workers at unionized plants to join unless they took advantage of a brief opt-out window. Virtually every new hire at unionized firms automatically became a union member, a flood of dues-payers as defense payrolls soared. Other new members came through organizing campaigns, which unions, aligning themselves with the war effort, often portrayed as patriotic endeavors. Union membership, which jumped from 3.6 million at the start of the Great Depression to 10.5 million in 1941, reached 14.8 million in 1945, with roughly one out of three nonagricultural workers carrying a union card. With only a few notable exceptions, the giant factory had been placed under the roof of the house of labor. Fordism had revolutionized the American economy and society; the uprising of industrial workers gave mass production a new, more democratic meaning.75