Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
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The majority of the Ford Motor Company’s workforce were immigrants, from Poland, Russia, Italy, the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, the Middle East, Japan, and Mexico. In addition to attracting foreign-born workers, Ford’s Five Dollar Day wage sparked a march of African Americans from the South who heard, correctly, that Ford paid equal wages to all male employees, regardless of skin color. The car industry’s absolute need for labor was insatiable in the 1920s and mitigated racism, though African Americans were generally assigned the hardest jobs and the ones with the least potential for advancement. And though ecumenical in his hiring practices, Ford still charged his Sociological Department with Americanizing immigrants, conditioning ongoing employment on their attending English and civic classes. These courses were intentionally mixed by race and country so as to “impress upon these men that they are, or should be, Americans, and that former racial, national, and linguistic differences are to be forgotten.” Commencement from the Ford school had the graduating workers, regaled in their native dress, singing their national songs and dancing their folk dances and climbing up a ladder to enter a large papier-mâché “melting pot.” On the stage’s backdrop was painted an immigrant steamship, and as Ford teachers stirred the pot with long ladles the new amalgamated Americans emerged in “derby hats, coats, pants, vests, stiff collars, polka-dot ties,” singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”11
Consider the case of Mustafa, an immigrant who before taking a job with the Ford Motor Company had plowed the fields with his father in Turkey. When he first came to Detroit, he lived in a squalid downtown boardinghouse. Like the rest of his “countrymen,” he washed his “hands and feet five times a day, as part of their religion before praying”—the hygiene of which impressed the sociological inspector less than the time it wasted troubled him (in 1914, Ford had fired nine hundred Orthodox Christians for missing a workday to celebrate Christmas in January). But after passing through Ford’s Americanization programs and moving to “a better locality,” Mustafa “put aside his national red fez and praying, no baggy trousers anymore. He dresses like an American gentleman, attends the Ford English school and has banked in the past year over $1,000.00.” “Let my only son be sacrificed for my boss,” the inspector claimed Mustafa said in gratitude for having had his life turned around. “May Allah send my boss Kismet.”12
As Ford biographer Robert Lacey put it, the “Five Dollar Day raised the pain threshold of capitalism.” But beyond an incentive to make workers stay put, it also became a model for how to respond to another crisis that plagued industrialism. The mechanized factory production that took flight during America’s Gilded Age had promised equality and human progress but in reality delivered deepening polarization and misery, particularly in sprawling industrial cities like Detroit. Ford, advised by farsighted company executives such as James Couzens and John Lee, understood that high wages and decent benefits would do more than create a dependable and thus more productive workforce; they would also stabilize and stimulate demand for industrial products by turning workers into consumers.
To this end, the Sociological Department promoted spending. Yet not just any kind of spending. Employees were not to waste their money on what Ford dismissed as “trumpery and trinkets,” goods made “only to be sold, and bought only to be owned,” which performed “no real service to the world and are at last mere rubbish as they were at first mere waste.” Ford’s inspectors rather encouraged workers to purchase vacuum cleaners, washing machines, houses, and, of course, Model Ts.13
At least for some and at least for a time, the Ford Motor Company, then, managed to redeem capitalism’s earlier promise of abundance. It created what was understood to be a closed, self-regulating circuit that both increased production and expanded consumption, whereby workers were able to purchase the products that they themselves made. “High wages,” said Ford, “to create large markets.”14
THE PUBLICITY GAINED from both his Five Dollar Day and Sociological Department combined with the popularity of the Model T allowed Ford to cultivate his image as a philosopher. Ford’s almost preternatural mechanical talent had been evident since he was a boy. Yet now in the middle of his life he discovered a new skill. The carmaker turned out, as one reporter put it, to be an “unrelenting, unremitting” master self-publicist who, with the help of a loyal, close-knit group of handlers and hired writers, succeeded in spinning his social awkwardness into wise enigma. Through the 1920s, he enjoyed more press coverage than any other American except President Calvin Coolidge.15
Two contradictory threads ran through the fabric of Ford’s homespun. One was a “Transcendentalists’ belief in man’s perfectibility.” Ford was a pacifist, suffragist, and death penalty opponent who believed that he had “invented the modern age.” “We don’t want tradition,” he said, “we want to live in the present, and the only history worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.” Not only did he take credit for ending society’s reliance on the horse but, repelled by his own boyhood memories of farmwork, he wanted to do away with all barnyard animals. “The cow must go,” he declared. In place of milk, Ford pushed soy milk. Instead of sheep’s wool, he suggested linen made from flax.16
In the other direction ran nostalgia for the world he helped end, one rooted in his rural background. Aphorisms that stressed “self-reliance and rugged individualism” as solutions to social ills eventually evolved into a darker critique of a world that he played a large role in creating, one in which social relations were growing ever more complex, ever more in flux, and ever more shaped by forces beyond face-to-face contact. The “city” became a common object of his criticism, as did “Wall Street financers” and, increasingly starting in the 1920s, “the Jew.”17
“I don’t like the city, it pins me in,” he said, “I want to breathe. I want to get out.”18
For the rest of his life, Ford—who as a boy walked for a day from his Dearborn family farm to lose himself in the anonymous pleasures of urban Detroit yet as a man came to despise the city as degenerate—bounced back and forth between these poles. He was a suffragist who didn’t offer women the same five-dollar-a-day wage he did men. He passionately advocated placing US sovereignty under the authority of the League of Nations and talked about the need to establish a “world government” well into the 1940s, but then condemned Jews for their “internationalism.” He called for the nationalization of the railroads and telegraph and telephone service, yet he hated Franklin Delano Roosevelt and refused to abide by New Deal regulation. He exalted the dignity of the worker and fashioned himself a scourge of the “capitalist” but was violently opposed to unionism. And he was a radical pacifist who once conceded that one last great war might be needed to finally bring about world disarmament. At the vanguard of the industrial and consumer revolution responsible for many of the vices he condemned, Ford tried to transcend this dissonance with a self-regard bordering on the Promethean. He reveled in publicity that presented him as humanity’s savior, once saying that if sent into an alley blindfolded he would lay his “hands by chance on the most shiftless and worthless fellow in the crowd” and “make a man out of him.”19
It was, after all, an age of competitive redemptions. Socialist: the radical journalist John Reed in his Ten Days That Shook the World described the 1917 Russian Revolution as building an earthly “kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer.” Russians, he said, would no longer need priests to “pray them into heaven.” Nationalist: T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, in an account of his role in helping to spark the 1922 Arab revolt against the Ottoman empire, wrote that the rebellion was fought in the name of a “new heaven and a new earth.” Fundamentalist: the Reverend Billy Sunday held 40,000-strong revival meetings in the heart of Detroit in the years after the inauguration of the Five Dollar Day, vying with Ford for the press’s attention. And capitalist: Ford too promised to deliver not just a cheap car to the “multitude” but a “new world, a new heaven, and a new earth.”20
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br /> CHAPTER 3
ABSOLUTE AMERICANISMS
THE GOLDEN AGE OF FORD ARRIVED IN EARLY 1914, WITH THE thunderclap promise of the Five Dollar Day, heralding industrial peace and prosperity. The rest of the 1910s and most of the 1920s were a period of dizzying economic triumph for Ford. Having bought all minority shares in Ford Motor Company, with no dividends to pay, partners to consult, or banks to report to, Ford moved forward with the construction of a new factory complex, which he built along the Rouge River, in the county of Dearborn, near where he was born. When it was finished, the River Rouge would be the largest, most synchronized industrial plant in the world: sixteen million square feet of floor space, ninety-three buildings, close to a hundred thousand workers, a dredged deepwater port, and the world’s largest steel foundry. Ford barges, trucks, and freight trains brought silica and limestone, coal and iron ore, wood and coal, brass, bronze, copper, and aluminum from Ford forests and mines in Michigan, Kentucky, and West Virginia to the Rouge’s gates and piers, and everything was organized to achieve maximum efficiency in receiving the material and getting it to the complex’s power plants, blast ovens, furnaces, mills, rollers, forges, saws, and presses, to be transformed into electricity, steel, glass, cement, and lumber. Where other factories processed raw materials once, Ford had the Rouge designed to allow for their intensive reuse. Rather than just burn coal for electricity and heat, coke ovens first broke down the rock into a high-burning compound that could be used in foundries to melt minerals to make castings. Only then was coke gas piped to the powerhouse to generate electricity. Wood chips were put to making cardboard, coal dust was swept off the floor and used to produce cement, metal scraps were tossed in the blast furnaces, and ammonium sulfate, another byproduct of the coking process, was sold as fertilizer. Refined raw materials then moved through a series of cranes, railcars, and crisscrossed covered conveyor belts to their final destination, the assembly plant—laid out on one floor to reduce unnecessary climbing. The Rouge was consecrated a “cathedral of industry,” and Ford, one of the richest and most celebrated men in history, ordained the high priest of the modern age.1
But Ford’s optimistic creed was tested by the outbreak of World War I, which had taken over a million lives by the end of 1914 and would eventually claim sixteen times as many. Historians have traced Ford’s distaste for militarism to his mother, Mary Litogot Ford, who, having given birth to Henry in the middle of the Civil War, nurtured in her son a hatred of all things martial. But it’s not hard to imagine Ford reading about European factories being used to mass manufacture ever bigger guns, larger-caliber ammunition, more lethal bombs, airplanes, submarines, mustard gas, and cars outfitted for battle and thinking that the hope of the Industrial Revolution had been turned inside out, that rather than deliver, as he kept saying it would, an easier, more satisfied life, it now made death possible on a scale heretofore unimaginable. The battle of Verdun alone consumed close to forty million artillery shells and over 300,000 lives. A half million died at the Somme, more than twice as many battle deaths as the entire Civil War.
Ford’s failure to keep the United States out of World War I—a task he pledged to devote his entire fortune to—initiated a series of political defeats and compromises that, by the time he considered moving into the Amazon, left him without any major success apart from the considerable ones that bore his name: his cars, tractors, planes, factories, and method of production. The Great War forced Ford to revise his international utopianism, undermining his faith that the rational ordering of industrial capitalism and human relations could bring about a better, harmonious world, free of battles and borders. Ford flailed, blaming one group after another for society’s ills. He continued to express an unbounded faith in the ability of technology to create human happiness, yet his proscriptions for reform became idiosyncratic and increasingly nativist. It is at this intersection of economic intoxication and political exhaustion that the idea of Fordlandia being something more than just a rubber plantation first took root.
FORD WENT PUBLIC with his opposition not just to World War I, or to war in general but to all preparation for war, which he said could only lead to war, in April 1915. “I am opposed to war in every sense of the word,” he said; soldiers should have the word murderer embroidered on their uniforms. In the following months Ford would issue a stream of equally emphatic statements, thrusting himself into the position of the world’s most famous pacifist, dedicated to both ending the European conflict and keeping the United States out of it. “I don’t believe in boundaries,” Ford told John Reed. “I think nations are silly and flags are silly too.” He said he planned to pull down the US flag from his factory and “hoist in its place the Flag of All Nations which is being designed in my office right now.”2
Jane Addams, another prominent peace activist, thought such pronouncements flamboyant. Yet they weren’t at odds with much of mainstream thought of the time. Many thought, on the eve of World War I, that pacifism was on the verge of triumph. A strong antiwar sentiment had emerged in all the world’s major religions, including in the growing Christian evangelical movement in the United States, making common cause with politicians in Europe, the United States, and Latin America to reorient the purpose of diplomacy away from militarism and dominance toward the resolution of conflict and the maintenance of peace. A respectable number of the world’s most prominent intellectuals, businessmen, politicians, and clergy could seriously argue that a world of perpetual peace, governed by the dispassionate rule of law, was within reach.
Ford reflected this début-de-siècle optimism but parted company with those who saw progress as being driven by politicians and governments. “History is more or less bunk,” Ford once famously said, by which he meant the kind of great-man or great-nation history that made it into textbooks. It was not just the “bankers, munitions makers, Kings and their henchmen” who pushed people into war, Ford thought, but “school books” that glorified battles as engines of historical movement. Ford was not averse to American expansion. He in fact had a pronounced belief in his and the United States’ ability to rejuvenate the world. Just not at the point of bayonets. “If we could put the Mexican peon to work,” Ford said in reference to the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution, which broke out in 1910, “treating him fairly and showing him the advantage of treating his employers fairly, the Mexican problem would disappear. There would be no more talk of a revolution. Villa would become a foreman, if he had brains. Carranza [another Mexican revolutionary] might be trained to be a good time-keeper.”3
Ford’s vision of a world made whole and happy by trade and industry is captured in his favorite poem, Lord Alfred Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall”:
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;
Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.*
It was technology, production, and commerce that made history, and it would be not gunboats or marines that would tame the world but his car. “In Mexico villages fight one another,” Ford said, but “if we could give every man in those villages an automobile, let him travel from his home town to the other town, and permit him to find out that his neighbors at heart were his friends, rather than his enemies, Mexico would be pacified for all time.” And t
o back up his point, he announced that any employee who left his job to join General John Pershing’s expedition to capture the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa would not find work waiting for him on his return.4
THE OUTBREAK OF war in Europe in August 1914 shattered the illusion that the battle flags of the world would soon be furled. Rather than dousing the dream, however, the European conflict provoked ever more desperate efforts to realize it, like Henry Ford’s “peace ship.”
Ford had seized on the notion of chartering an ocean liner to float a “people’s delegation” to Europe to negotiate an end to the conflict in November 1915, after an associate raised the idea in passing, and he threw himself into the endeavor with the same impetuous energy he brought to his other, more mechanical passions. “I will do everything in my power to prevent murderous, wasteful war in America and in the whole world,” he said, committing to stay in Europe as long as it took to bring peace to the continent. “I will devote my life to fight this spirit of militarism.” Working closely with members of the world peace movement, Ford arranged to rent the Scandinavian-American Line’s Oscar II and set up a command center in New York’s Biltmore Hotel, sending out a barrage of invitations to the best names in American politics, society, and industry to join his “international peace pilgrimage.” “We’re going to try to get the boys out of the trenches before Christmas,” was the slogan Ford adopted for the campaign, having come to appreciate the publicity value of a succinct, well-turned phrase.5