Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

by Greg Grandin

  SHORTLY AFTER LAUNCHING his village industry program in Michigan, Ford made a bid to realize his industrial pastoralism on a large scale in a depressed river valley—not in the Amazon but in Muscle Shoals, along a stretch of the Tennessee River in northwestern Alabama. The valley connected with the lower Mississippi and served as the drainage basin of the southern Appalachian mountains, home to over four million people, most of them farmers who lived lives of isolation, disease, and poverty.

  During the war, the US government had started but never completed building a series of nitrate factories and hydroelectric dams. Ford promised to finish the factories and build a dam as majestic as the Nile’s Aswan dam in Egypt, completed two decades earlier. Taming the unruly Tennessee River would stop its fearsome floods, make it navigable, and provide cheap electricity to the surrounding region. He also said he planned to establish a seventy-five-mile-long city, as thin as Manhattan but five and a half times its length. Other chaotic, unplanned cities grew in sprawls, in a “great circle” that trapped residents, never giving them a chance to “get a smell of the country air or see a green leaf.” Those who lived in Ford’s river metropolis, in contrast, would never be more than a mile from rolling hills and farmlands. The city—which some were calling a “Detroit of the South”—would exist symbiotically with the surrounding agricultural villages, drawing seasonal labor. In exchange, the Ford Motor Company would supply low-interest mortgages so workers could buy land to build a home (prefabricated to reduce cost) and farm. Ford factories would pay high wages, serve as a market for crops, provide affordable fertilizer, and organize the cooperative use of machinery like tractors, binders, threshers, and mills. Ford schools would teach wives home economics and children a useful trade. Shops, churches, and recreational centers would line a meandering road that tethered one end of the imagined community to another—an “All Main Street” city was how one magazine described Ford’s vision.17

  The benefits of the project would ripple out in concentric circles, supporters of the plan said, from southern Appalachia to the wider South, then to the Midwest and all of America. And sure enough, by 1922 vegetable and fruit production had increased throughout the valley, in expectation of the government’s granting Ford the concession. The New York Times reported that former slaveholding families who had kept their stagnant, undeveloped plantations “as a matter of sentiment ever since the Civil War” were selling them to entrepreneur farmers. As a result, a vibrant, dynamic population was “already being assembled for the city of Ford’s dreams.” The Atlanta Constitution, a New South tribune that had long advocated industrialization as a way of overcoming the Confederacy’s manorial legacy, praised the project, writing that it would revive steamboat commerce on the Tennessee, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers. “Within 500 miles of Muscle Shoals there are fifty large progressive cities and towns that would be vitally affected by the development of the Tennessee valley,” including Indianapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, Kansas City, Chattanooga, Birmingham, Montgomery, and Jacksonville.18

  For Henry Ford, Muscle Shoals would do this and more, pulling together the many threads of his social philosophy into one audacious bid.* He offered not the “city on a hill” that looms so large in American mythology but rather a “city in a valley,” powered by hydroelectricity, which would liberate residents from the energy trusts—in this case, from the Birmingham-based Alabama Power Company, which monopolized the region’s power supply. Cheap fertilizer could help end poverty and revitalize the agricultural sector: “There are too many people in this country—too many mouths to feed, too many bodies to clothe—to permit any soil to become exhausted.” His ribbon city would refute the idea that there “exists an essential conflict between industry and the farm.” “The farmer is idle through part of the year, and consequently has to live on his hump,” Ford said. “The worker in an industrial center is idle through part of the year, and he, too has to live on his hump.” The way to overcome this waste was, he believed, “to fit agriculture and industry together so that the farmer may also be an industrialist and the industrialist may also be a farmer.” And the development of hydroelectricity would truly make World War I the war to have ended all wars. “If the American people once can catch the idea of what water power means,” he said, “they never again will submit to the proposition that to get power they must pay tribute to Wall Street.” Ford even raised the idea of printing his own “energy dollar”—a regional currency based not on the gold standard but on the kilowatt output of the area’s dams—as a way to break the power of banks. Since the moneymen would have no “part either in financing or operating Muscle Shoals,” they wouldn’t be able to manipulate Americans into war. “The one big thing which I see in Muscle Shoals,” he said, “is an opportunity to eliminate war from the world.” Dirt-poor farmers who until then knew the river only as a source of danger and flooding and workers hoping for a wage-paying job agreed, and they rallied to support Ford’s proposal. One grassroots petition demanding the government hand over Muscle Shoals to Ford called the carmaker the “Moses for 80% of us.”19

  Frank Lloyd Wright remarked that Ford’s valley city, imagined above in an illustration published in Scientific American in 1922, was “one of the best things” he had ever heard of. Ford was “going to split up the big factory,” Wright said. “He was going to give every man a few acres of ground for his own.”

  “If Muscle Shoals is developed along unselfish lines,” Ford predicted, “it will work so splendidly and so simply that in no time hundreds of other waterpower developments will spring up all over the country and the days of American industry paying tribute for power would be gone forever. Every human being in the country would reap the benefit. I am consecrated to the principle of freeing American industry.” “We could,” he said, “make a new Eden of our Mississippi Valley, turning it into the great garden and powerhouse of the country.”20

  NEVER FAR FROM Ford’s sunny vision of an industrial arcadia as a solution to America’s problems, and indeed inseparable from it, was a darkening opinion as to who was causing those problems. In the early days of his public fame, Ford’s exhortations to achieve the kind of self-reliant individualism celebrated by Ralph Waldo Emerson seemed folksy. As he aged and many of his reforms either failed to solve or actually aggravated social problems, they sounded downright Nietzschean: “Prayers are a disease of the will,” Ford quoted Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” essay in his pocket notebook.

  Most Americans in the mid-1920s still thought of Ford as the Ford of 1914, the reformer who with his Five Dollar Day and Sociological Department promised to put into place a new industrial humanism, to cultivate virtuous, productive workers through civic education and the inducements of high wages conditioned on proper living. Yet Ford had pretty much abandoned his liberal paternalism. His company, particularly his new River Rouge plant, had grown too big for such hands-on nurturing. Ford still paid better than most industrial companies, but he came to rely on two quite different tactics to increase productivity and enforce labor discipline in his far-flung Michigan empire. The first tactic was the speedup, which pushed the idea of synchronized assembly lines to the limits of human endurance and made working for Ford, as one employee who quit the line put it, a “form of hell on earth that turned human beings into driven robots.” “The chain system you have is a slave driver,” wrote the wife of one worker to Ford. “That $5 a day is a blessing,” she said, “a bigger one than you know but oh they earn it.” Every day it seemed like the belt moved a little faster, as performance technicians, armed with stopwatches, shadowed workers, figuring out ways to shave off seconds here and there from their motions. Intellectuals and social critics began to draw attention to the dehumanization of the line. “Never before,” wrote a contemporary observer, “had human beings been fitted so closely into the machines, like minor parts, with no independence or chance to retain their individual self-respect.” Ford’s factory turned workers into “mere containers of labor, like gond
ola cars of coal. They arrived full; they left in the evening as empty of human vitality as the cars were empty of coal. The trolleys which crawled away from Highland Park at closing time were hearses for the living dead.” “It’s sickening to watch the workers bent over their machines,” wrote Louis-Ferdinand Céline, based on his firsthand study of the physical and mental health of Ford workers. “You give in to the noise as you give in to war. At the machines you let yourself go with two, three ideas that are wobbling about at the top of your head. And that’s the end. From then on everything you look at, everything you touch, is hard. And everything you still manage to remember more or less becomes as rigid as iron.”21

  Fear was the second tactic, needed to forestall the discontent that such a system inevitably generated. It was instilled largely by Harry Bennett, a former pugilist but inveterate brawler who presided over the company’s so-called Service Department, nominally the employment office but in reality a three-thousand-member goon squad—described by the New York Times as the “largest private quasi-military organization in existence”—made up of spies and thugs armed with guns, whips, pipes, blackjacks, and rubber hoses otherwise known as “persuaders.” Hired in 1916 to work security, Bennett quickly caught Ford’s attention with his gamecock confidence, and he soon became not only Ford’s enforcer but his near constant companion, one of the most powerful men in the company, whose authority was based not on any engineering or marketing knowledge but on his ability to terrorize workers, to make them conform to the Rouge’s perpetual speedup. The former navy boxer used his connections with Detroit’s Mafia to weave “the Ford Motor Company into a network of underworld connections with hoodlums of largely Italian origin, and the unholy alliance came into its own in the battle which Ford fought against the unions with increasing ferocity as the decade went by,” wrote Robert Lacey. Where Ford in the press was touting his village industries as nurturing healthy communities, in the Rouge Bennett, according to historian Douglas Brinkley, used fear and intimidation to keep its “workforce of 70,000 as a group of isolated individuals, and not let them create a community.” The terror spread out from Dearborn to encompass Ford’s dispersed assembly plants, as Bennett cobbled together an interstate consortium of antiunion toughs. In Dallas, Texas, for instance, Bennett converted the Ford plant’s champion tug-of-war team into a security unit, headed by one “Fats” Perry, who by his own estimation handed out scores of savage beatings. “If it takes bloodshed,” the plant management told its workers during a forced mass meeting, “we’ll shed blood right down to the last drop” to keep the plant union free.22

  It was not just physical violence, which Brinkley says Bennett dispensed with “brutish zeal,” but the distrust generated by constant surveillance that kept workers in line. Bennett claimed that one in three line workers was an informer. “The whole city,” recalled one union organizer, “was a network of spies that reported every whisper back to Bennett,” allowing him to stalk workers not just within the Rouge’s gates but in their “private life as well.” He carried out Ford’s edict that workers stop drinking, even in their own homes, and forced workers, at the pain of losing their jobs, to buy a Ford car.23 For Ford employees, then, Fordism went from being a system in which they were paid enough of a wage to be able to buy the products they made to being one where they had little choice in the matter.24

  Throughout the 1920s, most Americans, aside from those who worked inside a Ford factory or who had family who did, were unaware of Bennett’s brutality. But they couldn’t help know of Ford’s anti-Semitism, which first erupted in public in 1920. Over the course of the next seven years, the Dearborn Independent, a local newspaper Ford purchased a year earlier, blamed the Jews for nearly all that was wrong with America, the degradation of its culture, the corruption of its politics, and the distortion of its economy through monopolies, trusts, and the “money system.” It was Ford, and not his admirer Hitler, who popularized the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document concocted by Russia’s tsarist government to fuel belief in the existence of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. Most observers have located the roots of Ford’s anti-Semitism in midwestern populism’s critique of bankers and the gold standard, aggravated by Ford’s tendency to reduce the complexities of the world to their most simple, mechanical terms. The historian Richard Hofstadter called his hatred of Jews and Wall Street “the foibles of the Michigan farm boy who had been liberally exposed to Populist notions.” Ford’s anti-Semitism, however, was not just a holdover sentiment from America’s receding agrarian past but also one element of a larger sinister appraisal of the world he helped create.25

  In another of his notebooks, Ford scribbled a reference to Gustave Le Bon, a French sociologist who died in 1931, and his 1895 book, Psychology of Crowds. It’s a telling notation, for many have noted that both Mussolini and Hitler were influenced by Le Bon’s argument that the “irrational crowd” was the defining feature of modern life, something that needed to be controlled lest it lead to degeneration. Ford was sympathetic to Nazism, and he seems to similarly have taken to heart Le Bon’s warning that the “claims of the masses” were “nothing less than a determination to utterly destroy society as it now exists.” Yet what stopped Ford from turning into a full-fledged fascist was that he took the opposite lesson from Le Bon than did Mussolini and Hitler. Where the two fascists drew from Le Bon to mobilize the masses—through political pageantry, mass communication, and, in the case of Hitler, an eliminationist racism—Ford put most of his energies into dispersing the threat, through his many proposals to “decentralize” industrial production.26

  By the mid-1920s, the man who had assembled together in one factory the largest concentration of industrial workers in history had pronounced the crowded metropolis “doomed,” crumbling under the weight of traffic, pollution, vice, and the cost of “policing great masses of people.”27 Previewing the kind of antiurban sentiment that would become commonplace among the right in the United States in the years after World War II, Ford started condemning the city as “untamed and threatening,” an “artificial,” parasitical “mass” that “some day will cease to be.” Throughout the 1920s, as the “claims of the masses” became impossible to ignore, particularly in Ford’s own factories, where workers were beginning to contest the speedup and Bennett’s terror, Ford fused his three great hatreds—of Jews, war, and unions—into a single conspiracy: “Unions are organized by Jewish financiers, not labor,” he said. “Their object is to kill competition so as to reduce the income of the workers and eventually bring on war.” “People can be manipulated only when they are organized,” Ford insisted.28

  The man who once repudiated tradition and declared himself the executor of the modern world was having published under his byline in the Dearborn Independent articles that denounced “change,” which he warned was “not always progress.” “The trouble with us today is that we have been unfaithful to the White Man’s traditions and privileges,” one article said. Having thrown open his factory gates to workers from across the world and declared that he didn’t like borders of any kind, he now looked warily at Ellis Island, with its “horde of people who have been systematically beforehand taught that the United States is a ‘capitalistic country,’ not to be enjoyed but to be destroyed.” Ford would continue to condemn war and those who profited from it, yet the man who once scolded Theodore Roosevelt for his antiquated militarism now cautioned his “race” that it needed to maintain “unrelenting vigilance” against two threats: one was a “corrupt orientalism” that was “breaking down the rugged directness of the White Man’s Code,” the other a “false cry of ‘Peace, Peace’ when there is no peace.”29

  BEYOND THE PROBLEMS and abuses that Ford himself couldn’t solve, created, aggravated, or compromised on—depressed agricultural prices, labor violence, anti-Semitism, the dehumanization of machine work, and war—it became apparent throughout the 1920s that both his car and his factory system worked against the world he hoped to bring into being.

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p; Ford imagined his method as a powerful integrator: the rational application of technology would allow for the holistic development of industry and agriculture; the tractor and other advances in mechanization would relieve the drudgery of field and barn, the car and truck would knit regional markets closer together, providing new sources of income for hard-strapped farmers; radios and telephones would overcome rural isolation (starting in the 1930s, Ford broadcast from a company studio in Dearborn his Sunday Evening Hour, which featured “familiar music, majestically rendered,” as well as editorials reflecting the “philosophic views of the Founder”); and grounding it all was a faith in the alchemic power of high wages to create prosperous, healthy working-class communities, with private profit dependent on the continual expansion of consumer markets. “Our buying class is our working class,” Ford said clearly and simply, and “our working class must become our ‘leisure class’ if our immense production is to be balanced by consumption.” At his most eccentric, Ford insisted that the fulfillment of this vision would result in a restoration of small-town America.30

  But Fordism, and the product it was first associated with, was also a potent dissolving agent.* The car transmuted sexual mores and loosened the bonds between men and women, children and parents. It alleviated the burden of farmwork and brought points on the map closer together, yet the automobile also began the transformation of human settlements and migration patterns, broadening the social horizon of people’s lives. Daily commutes grew longer, and families spread out. The extension of paved highways, the widening of existing thoroughfares, and the sprawl of industrialized metropolises were visible threats to the rural communities so treasured by Ford as the repository of American virtue. By 1920, the county Ford’s wife grew up in, Greenfield Township, was absorbed by Detroit, and later in the decade he had to move his childhood home to save it from destruction due to the planned expansion of a county road. He relocated it to a model American town he had begun building near his River Rouge plant, which he named Greenfield Village. As an industrial method, too, Fordism had embedded within it the seeds of its own undoing. The breaking down of the assembly process into smaller and smaller tasks, combined with rapid advances in transportation and communication, made it easier for manufacturers to break out of the dependent relationship established by Ford between high wages and large markets. Goods could be made in one place and sold somewhere else, removing the incentive employers had to pay workers enough to buy the products they made. While it would be decades before the implications of this change would become fully apparent, already by the 1920s the component elements of the economy that in Ford’s mind operated as a symbiotic whole—land, labor, resources, manufacturing, finance, and consumption—were drifting apart.