1927 and the Rise of Modern America

by Charles Shindo

  Sales for the Model T declined steadily in 1926. Ford’s belief in a universal automobile for the masses had placed the Ford Motor Company at the top of the automobile industry, accounting for more than half of all U.S. auto sales in the early 1920s at roughly 1 million sales per year. But sticking to this belief threatened to lead the company into bankruptcy by 1927. Sales of the Model T made up less than a third of U.S. auto sales in 1926, a drop caused by a number of factors, including market saturation, cost, and Ford’s unwillingness to provide credit to consumers. In 1926, 19 million out of 23.4 million U.S. families owned automobiles, making car ownership no longer a novelty and creating a pool of second- and third-time car buyers looking for more accessories and style than the Model T offered. Basic transportation was no longer enough for most consumers. The most desired models were enclosed sedans. Ford’s basic and most affordable Model T was an open touring car; his enclosed sedans were priced closer to the competition’s and therefore were not a significant bargain. In addition, Ford felt that extending credit was immoral, whereas his competitors supplied easy credit to their customers. When Ford finally agreed to installment purchases, payments needed to be completed before delivery of the automobile. The reliability of the Model T reinforced its own sales decline because its primary market, first-time car buyers, could find many less expensive used Model Ts for sale, in many cases by Ford’s competitors, who allowed consumers to trade in their Model Ts on new Chevrolets, Buicks, Pontiacs, and Cadillacs.3 For all these reasons, Ford’s plan of flooding the world with Model Ts fell short of its goal.

  Competition, primarily from General Motors and most specifically from its Chevrolet division, pointed out the weaknesses in Ford’s methods. Fordism, the idea of mass production of a single product for a mass market, died with the Model T. A 1927 promotional film celebrating the fifteen-millionth Model T as it toured the nation remained unused because the car was no longer in production by the time the film was made. In May 1927 Ford stopped production of the Model T and closed down his factories to retool for a new model. With no advanced plan for such a transition, Ford completely shut down manufacturing while his engineers developed the Model A, and at the same time figured out how to redesign the factory to build it. The retooling process included the replacement of around 15,000 machine tools, the rebuilding of 25,000 others, and the reconfiguring of $5 million in dies and fixtures. In total, the process cost Ford $100 million and lost him market share; in addition, the New York World estimated that 500,000 contractors, dealers, and workers suffered financial hardship, and in some cases ruin. Layoffs at Ford’s Detroit plants accounted for 45 percent of the city’s relief recipients in 1927.4

  In the process of retooling, Ford completed the development of a single, vertically integrated plant at his River Rouge production facility. The Rouge plant had been the processing site of raw materials from Ford-owned mines, forests, and rubber plantations and the manufacturing locale of automobile parts and components. The final assembly of the Model T took place at the Highland Park assembly plant. Beginning with the Model A, Ford moved the assembly line to River Rouge and created a self-contained manufacturing enterprise in which Ford controlled everything from the raw materials, through processing and manufacturing, to final assembly. The Rouge plant consisted of 23 main buildings, 70 minor buildings and structures, almost 100 miles of railroad tracks, 53,000 machines, docks and slips along the river, and 75,000 employees.5 The River Rouge plant was a culmination of the ideas of Ford, a visible representation of Fordism.

  In the midst of all this turmoil, Ford kept the plans for the Model A concealed from the public. Speculation increased the market for the new model, and by its debut, half a million customers had paid down payments on a car they had never seen. When the Model A was finally unveiled on December 2, 1927, approximately 100,000 curious customers crowded Ford’s Detroit showroom. Police had to contain crowds in Cleveland, and in New York the buildup of interested people began at three o’clock in the morning and grew to such great size that Madison Square Garden was enlisted to serve as a temporary showroom. In less than two full days, over 10 million Americans had viewed the Model A, and by the close of a week, 25 million people, or just under 20 percent of the U.S. population, had visited a Ford showroom for a glimpse of the Model A. Many car buyers, knowing Ford would be creating a new model, had postponed their purchases until the Model A’s debut, as witnessed by the drop in overall automobile sales in 1927 by nearly 1 million cars. But during Ford’s absence from the market (full production at Ford’s plants was severely constricted or nonexistent for more than a year), Chevrolet outsold Ford, and for the first time since the introduction of the Model T, Ford did not dominate the automobile industry.6

  Chevrolet had taken many of the ideas of Fordism (many top executives in competing automobile companies had once been Ford employees and made up a group so large that Keith Sward dubbed them the “Ford Alumni Association”) and adapted them to a changing market driven by consumption, not production.7 In realizing the power of the consumer to choose style over substance, Chevrolet sought to produce an inexpensive car that did not look cheap. As the president and general manager of the Chevrolet division of General Motors, William Knudsen, put it, Chevrolet sought to “modernize its [product’s] appearance so as to remove the inevitable stigma which rests on low priced articles that show it.”8 Knudsen, a former Ford employee, helped Chevrolet increase its production by implementing Ford-style organization in Chevy factories, but he developed the use of standardized machines (not single-purpose machines) to create the parts necessary for assembly, which allowed for yearly changes in the manufacturing of various parts, especially body parts. Chevrolet was able to change its automobiles without having to close down its factories and replace and retool its machines. In 1927, Chevrolet began the planning of a six-cylinder production automobile, first by enlarging the bodies of existing models to accept a larger engine (1928 models) and then by adding the larger engine (1929 models). The transition from producing four-cylinder to six-cylinder automobiles was so well thought out that it took only six weeks to accomplish and was accompanied by an increase in production, as opposed to Ford’s dramatic shutdown of production. When Ford finally did unveil the Model A, only a few hundred cars existed, many fewer than one for each Ford showroom in the United States.

  Not only did Chevrolet integrate changing styles into its production process, but it also differed from Ford in purchasing and contracting practices and in centralization. While Ford was building his ultimate industrial city at River Rouge, Chevrolet was decentralizing the production process, in part by relying on other General Motors divisions for parts, but also by spreading out the manufacturing of parts to four different plants, each specializing in a specific set of components (in Flint, Bay City, and Detroit, Michigan, and in Toledo, Ohio), and the assembly of automobiles to seven different assembly plants strategically located across the country (from Tarrytown, New York, to Oakland, California). This enabled Chevrolet to produce its products closer to where they would be sold and to be independent of any single labor pool. This decentralized model of production, not Ford’s River Rouge model, emerged as the industry standard.

  For Chevrolet, the look of its cars was as important, if not more important, than their mechanical attributes. Ford had built its reputation on the idea that the Model T was a practical item, a necessity, not a luxury, and that therefore its appearance did not matter. The “black only” color policy of the Ford Motor Company was not an initial feature of the Model T, nor was black the only color choice in the mid-1920s, but the idea that “any customer can have any car painted any color so long as it is black”9 represented to the public the Ford philosophy of practicality over luxury and function over form. General Motors, on the other hand, sought to appeal to consumer desires by hiring designer Harley Earl in 1927. Earl had made his reputation as a custom designer of automobile bodies for the style-conscious stars of the motion picture industry, and he headed General Moto
rs’ newly created Art and Color department.10

  the machine as art

  To increase even further the interest in the Model A, Ford spent around $1.3 million for five days of intensive advertising.11 Ford had only reentered the advertising field in 1923 when sales of the Model T had reached its peak of 57 percent of the automobile market. This return to advertising was mainly due to Ford’s acquisition of Lincoln Motors and Ford’s resulting attempt to integrate the more luxurious Lincolns with the more practical Fords in a unified and nationally coordinated campaign. Such marketing also meant targeting segments of the mass market that were most resistant to the pragmatic claims for the Model T, women. Ford also began to develop consciously its corporate image, aiming to “familiarize the public with the Ford industry, its vast facilities for the manufacture of products on a production basis and to point out that by owning and controlling its own sources of raw materials greater value can be passed on to the consumer.”12 Ford’s production methods, or Fordism, became a source of advertising itself, since the efficiency and practicality of the production process was ideally represented in the product, the practical Model T.

  By 1927, Ford employed the services of the N. W. Ayer advertising agency of Philadelphia to help coordinate this national campaign. Not only did the campaign provide the public with glimpses of the Model A, along with explaining its general concept, its affordability, and its mechanical innovations, but it also continued the practice of associating the products and processes of the Ford Motor Company with Henry Ford himself. It was with the campaign for the Model A that “the company, creator of modern ‘cities of industry’ at Highland Park and the Rouge, generator of new imagery of modernity almost as a byproduct, began to respond consistently to the new demands of the image.”13 Part of this response to the “demands of the image” was the commissioning of photographer/painter Charles Sheeler as an indirect part of Ford advertising. N. W. Ayer’s art director, Vaughn Flannery, often enlisted Sheeler to photograph products for other agency clients, such as Koehler plumbing fixtures and Canada Dry beverages. Sheeler also produced studio portraits for Vogue and Vanity Fair, in addition to his painting. Sheeler believed that objects, both human and man-made, should be seen for their intrinsic beauty and that, on that criterion, there was no real difference between painting and photography for art’s sake or for commercial purposes. Flannery believed that photographs by Sheeler, who was also known in the art world, would result in an artistic rendering of Ford’s industrialism, thus making the Ford Motor Company appear more “upscale,” aesthetic, and modern. The photographs would not be used in mass-market ads but, rather, would be distributed to more elite publications, such as Vanity Fair. These photographs would be not simply documentation or advertisement or art but, rather, a combination of the three. Flannery, like Sheeler, did not categorize photographs into exclusive functions, but in following the lead of the Bauhaus movement, both Flannery and Sheeler sought to combine the applied and fine arts.14

  Sheeler spent six weeks at Ford’s River Rouge plant (during the fall of 1927, when the factory was closed down for the retooling for the Model A), and his photographs not only helped alter the image of the Ford Motor Company but also helped usher in a new image of American modernity.15 Sheeler believed that artists should attempt to express the concerns of the day, and “since industry predominately concerns the greatest numbers, finding an expression for it concerns the artist.”16 Sheeler admired the accomplishments of Henry Ford, especially as they were embodied in the River Rouge plant. “Even having seen it,” Sheeler wrote to his friend Walter Arnesberg, “one doesn’t believe it possible that one man could be capable of realizing such a conception.”17 Indeed, it was the realized conception that Sheeler sought to portray in his photographs and in the paintings he created from them. Sheeler’s photographs do not document the processes of the River Rouge plant, nor do they portray the workings of the men or machines there; what they do illustrate is the beauty of the created forms, and not the forms of the product (auto bodies, chassis, wheels, and so on), but the forms of the machines and buildings created to make the product (conveyors, smokestacks, cranes, and the like). Sheeler’s Criss-Crossed Conveyors, River Rouge Plant, Ford Motor Company (1927) presents two covered conveyor lines crossing in front of smokestacks and water towers. Not a single human figure is visible, nor is there any sense of activity or motion. The scene is completely static. Unlike much industrial photography, especially for advertising, which focuses on the product within the context of its creation, Sheeler emphasized the means of production over the product itself. These means are treated, in his work, as if they were the product, a product that is not only aesthetically pleasing to the eye but functionally pleasing to the intellect as well because of the complexity of its engineering, construction, and function.

  In most of the more than forty photographs taken at the plant, Sheeler excluded the human element, most significantly the workers who worked the machines, in favor of showing the machinery itself. This exclusion of the worker presents the idea that the human force behind the machine is not the man who worked at it but the man who created it, who conceptualized it, who built it, and in certain respects, who financed it. The photographs present the idea of the industrialist as artist, or at least artisan, instead of the idea of technology as replacement for the skilled craftsmen. The machine is the new craft, and the engineers and industrialists are the new craftsmen; therefore, technology is not replacing craftsmanship but, rather, creating new forms of it. It is in this presentation that the ambiguities of Henry Ford start to make sense. Ford did not see himself as destroying the nineteenth-century way of life, that of the small farmer, small businessman, and artisan. Rather, Henry Ford believed he was remaking American society by imbuing the mechanistic technology of the twentieth century with the values of the nineteenth century. Ford’s desire to give modern technology the stamp of artisanal craftsmanship reinforced his ideas about his workforce and the values they should maintain. He did not view his workers as laborers or consumers but, rather, as yeoman industrialists who should retain the nineteenth-century values of self-sufficiency and gentility.

  This concern for craftsmanship and form is also present in Sheeler’s earlier paintings of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, barns and New York City skyscrapers, as well as in the work of other painters and photographers who collectively became known as the precisionists. While not a coherently definable artistic movement, precisionists (also known as new classicists, cubist-realists, or immaculates) shared certain traits in their works, mainly precision, objectivity, and simplification in form, along with a preference for machine-age content. They were often viewed as an American variant of an international trend among artists “during and just after the First World War, in which they sought a more orderly and rational art symbolized by, and derived from, machine technology.”18 In this sense, precisionism can be linked to the Dutch De Stijl, French purism, Russian constructivism, and German Bauhaus and Neue Sachlichkeit movements, in that they all view technology, in the words of Reyner Banham, as “the agent of collective discipline and an order that drew nearer to the canons of Classical aesthetics.”19 This classical influence can be seen in the architectonic placement of objects in the works of the precisionists. Cubism also influenced these artists in its attempt to reduce objects to their most basic forms, but the precisionists maintained a greater degree of realism in their representations than did pure cubists, synthesizing French cubism with American realism. In technique, these artists sought to create forms more graphic (or even photographic) than artistic, and therefore they painted smooth surfaces mainly devoid of harsh brushstrokes and variations in paint thickness. It is this immaculate style and precision of form and technique that best characterizes this group of painters.

  In addition to Sheeler, painter/photographer Morton Schamberg; painters Charles Demuth, Elsie Driggs, Louis Lozowick, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Joseph Stella; and photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand were among the
artists working in the precisionist style. Even though industrial subjects (factories, bridges, skyscrapers, machines) dominated the work of these artists, their concern for form and craftsmanship can be seen in works featuring rural structures, as in Sheeler’s paintings and photographs of rural Pennsylvanian barns, O’Keeffe’s studies of Lake George houses, and Peter Blume’s New England winterscapes (Winter, New Hampshire, 1927), and even organic forms, such as O’Keeffe’s paintings of flowers and Strand’s and Edward Weston’s photographs of rocks and shells (Strand: “Rock, Georgetown, Maine,” 1927; Weston: “Shell,” 1927). O’Keeffe saw in these flowers not a symbolic idea but, rather, an aesthetic form rendered closely, forcing the viewer to see its structural beauty (Red Poppies, 1927). The same idea holds true for the precisionists’ paintings of urban scenes, which primarily focused on buildings and bridges (O’Keeffe: Radiator Building—Night, New York, 1927; Driggs: Queensborough Bridge, 1927; Lozowick’s cities series, including Butte, Oklahoma, Panama, and Seattle, all 1926–1927) and industrial settings (Driggs: Pittsburgh, 1927; Demuth: My Egypt, 1927). In all of these works, the structure of the object is the subject of the work. Human figures rarely intrude on the scene, and for the most part the contents of the works are represented as static, more sculptural than mechanical. It was the machine that formed the basic unifying idea behind this artistic movement. These works do not simply celebrate the machine and its prominence in American life; they center their attention on seeing the forms of industry as something created by man, and therefore creative. They also share the idea that since the United States excelled in industry, this emphasis on the art of industry was primarily American, as witnessed by the almost exclusive use of American subjects in these works.