1913

by Charles Emmerson

  At Highland Park, the city’s largest factory, more than half the workers had been born outside the United States, ‘men of every race and creed’ wrote one visiting journalist approvingly. The plant was to be Ford’s own version of Zangwill’s ‘melting pot’, churning out not just Model Ts but a truly American workforce: hard-working, conscientious, well-paid, consumers as well as producers. Within a few years, graduations from the company’s English school saw foreign-born employees enter a giant cauldron marked ‘Ford English School Melting Pot’ in foreign costume, from which they emerged a few minutes later dressed in American clothes waving American flags.5

  Established in 1913, the Ford English School, along with Ford’s other social innovations, was partly a matter of enlightened self-interest. Company managers observed that a common language, alongside high wages, comfortable working conditions and the enforcement of standards of personal discipline led to greater efficiency and higher rates of workforce retention. The Highland Park building itself was designed to be the very opposite of the traditional, dark industrial complex. The size of the place, the largest building under one roof in Michigan, was impressive but not new – German architect Walter Gropius compared the scale and ambition of American industrial buildings with the pyramids of Egypt.6 But under the direction of another German architect, Albert Kahn, fully three-quarters of the wall space of the huge Highland Park building was glass, increasing natural light for the workers and earning the factory the nickname the ‘Crystal Palace’.7 Both the building design and the company’s programmes to educate the workforce were part of a broader Fordist vision of society: as something to be constantly improved upon in the light both of modern science and the values of the traditional American homestead, such as that on which Henry Ford had grown up. Following these twin principles, Ford believed, Highland Park could be a successful model factory, and Detroit a successful model city.

  Alongside work for Detroit’s workers, of course, there was leisure for its citizens. In the summer of 1913 the city’s inhabitants could take in Nero Burns Rome at the Detroit Opera House. The Polish-language Fredro theatre opened that year on the corner of Chene and Kirby. For visitors there was the prospect of midnight excursions on the water separating the United States from Canada, or dancing on Wednesday and Saturday evenings in the pavilion on Sugar Island.8

  Confidence in Detroit’s future was written in its skyline. The city claimed its own skyscraper, the Dime Building, with four more planned for the year ahead. On the edges of downtown stood the proud Michigan Central Station, both ‘mammoth and beautiful’, designed by the same architects as Penn Station in New York.9 With eleven tracks for passenger trains, and one for freight, Michigan Central opened its doors at the end of 1913, a reminder that while the future might belong to the automobile the present belonged to the railway train. From here, travellers could take trains to nearby towns, or to the next state, or as far as Florida. The fact that the station was brought into service eight days early – the result of a fire in the old depot – was taken as a sign of efficient organisation rather than a portent of the station’s future obsolescence. ‘There was no fuss or feathers about the matter’, reported the local newspaper, ‘the fire broke out at 2.10; at 3.30 the Wolverine Express from Chicago steamed importantly up to the new 16 storey terminal and at 3.50 steamed out again … and by supper time outgoing trains were leaving as if they had been accustomed to it for years’. The clock on the old depot had stopped still at 2.40 a.m. – but Detroit had already moved on.

  It was not inevitable that Detroit would become the unquestioned centre of the American car industry, nor that this industry would do more to shape America than any other. Ford had many national rivals in the first decade of the twentieth century: Cole Motor Company and National Motor Company in Indianapolis, the Willys-Overland Company in Toledo, Ohio, Borland-Grannis in Chicago, the White Company in Cleveland and the Pierce Arrow in Buffalo, New York, to name a few. While some made gasoline cars, like Ford, others thought the future lay with electric vehicles. Where roads existed at all they were generally poorly maintained, hampering the use of automobiles beyond a specified radius of homes and making interstate travel an expedition into the unknown. The first motoring hotels were only just emerging; the route of the interstate Lincoln Highway was only drawn up in 1913. In late September Detroit hosted the American Road Congress, a nod to the city’s increasingly dominant role in the automobile industry and to the beginnings of a mass automobile culture in the Midwestern states, with twice as many cars per thousand inhabitants as the South, and nearly as many as New England.10 But, even now, Detroit’s position was not necessarily unassailable.

  Ford was not the city’s only automobile manufacturer, nor were cars the city’s only industry. Detroit had long been associated with the fur trade. It also turned out cigars, elevator cabs, picture frames and furniture. In September the city organised a Made in Detroit exhibition across the city, running late into the evening, which included a number of mechanical displays and forty-five different types of car. The organiser, Mr Zenner, told a reporter that the exhibit ‘will give Detroiters a better idea of the greatness of their own city and will impress visitors with Detroit as a city of large and varied enterprises’.11 Whereas New York had earned itself a reputation – unfairly, perhaps – as a dandified city of personal convenience, where ‘you can be shaved, manicured, have your shoes shined, smoke a cigar, and read the paper all at the same time’, Detroit presented itself to the world as an industrial workshop, able to turn its hand to anything.12 Alongside the lessons learned from the failures of his predecessors, it was these smaller industries – proving grounds for innovation, incubators of practical engineering skills, suppliers of all the parts needed to build a car – that enabled Ford’s success. In this crucial sense, it was not Henry Ford who made Detroit, it was Detroit that made Henry Ford.

  Yet Ford had the ability to capitalise on the advantages which Detroit provided him and, above all, the vision to create and sustain a wholly new market for his products. Unlike most of his competitors, Henry Ford designed a car not for the elite but for the masses, for the average citizen of smalltown America rather than the wealthy city-dweller for whom the automobile signified status above all. While most automobile manufacturers built cars that were strong, heavy and powerful – great for cruising down city streets, but prone to sink into the mud of unpaved country lanes – Ford built a car that was light and flexible, cheaper to make and run, and less likely to break down. The Model T was a car for everyman.

  There was commercial logic to the proposition of a cheap car that would not break down. But there was also a moralising side to it, and ultimately a vision of American economic development driven by the automobile. In 1906, Woodrow Wilson had declared that ‘nothing has spread socialistic feeling in this country more than the automobile; to the country man they are a picture of arrogance and wealth with all its independence and carelessness’, responsible for the accidents on the front page of each newspaper, every day.13 Ford sought to reverse that picture, making the car a symbol of individual empowerment and social responsibility rather than one of wealthy high-handedness. Ford owners were advised of the consequences of speed on the ‘smashing power’ of collisions, and instructed that ‘the men who buy this automobile [the Model T] prize safety more than speed. They are not joy riders’.14

  The pages of the Ford Times – distributed to Ford dealers, owners and prospective customers, allowing the magazine to claim the widest circulation of any industrial publication – were filled with conservative homespun wisdom. ‘It may have taken a million years to make a man out of a monkey; but it doesn’t take a million drinks to make a monkey out of a man’, warned the magazine.15 ‘The one thing we need most to fear is fear’, it advised.16 Fun was made of the vanity of a Michigan woman who bought a $5000 automobile for the same reason that she ‘had diamonds set in the fillings of her teeth’.17 Smoking was banned from Ford showrooms, and salesmen were told to dress dow
n, rather than appear know-it-all or flashy. In one edition, a story ran about how a Model T Ford hooked up to a generator had allowed the telephones in a rural Kentucky community to keep going after a power failure, showing the automobile embedded in a community as much as the horse and cart in previous years.18 In another, space was given to the story of a group of girls who had sold 1,900 copies of a calendar in order to raise money to get their local church pastor a Model T.19

  The employees of the Highland Park plant, which churned out Model T Fords on the world’s first production line. The most expensive photograph ever taken, according to the Fordist maxim that time equals money.

  In the January 1913 issue of Ford Times a prospective customer – in this case, a male farmer – was painted a picture of freedom and development brought by ownership of an automobile and, under the title ‘Better Roads – Bigger Farm Values’, enlisted in a campaign to improve the nation’s byways:

  The roads are so easy to travel, you go to town more frequently than you used to, and once in a while you bring back something to make her work easier. Then there are the papers and magazines that come to you regularly each month … Telephone companies are more anxious to extend their lines to communities where the roads are good, for they know there is more business than in backwoods localities. So you have the telephone … Soon you will be able to buy your goods at city stores and have them delivered right to your front door … This would be an impossible task if your roads were unimproved.

  ‘A new Declaration of Independence is made by every man who resolves to own a Ford’, declared the magazine a few months later. In all this, Henry Ford widened the appetite for modernity, resolving its urban anxieties into an older creed of self-advancement.20

  As the practical vehicle for the aspirations of the common man, the Model T was to be built – and sold – at scale. Rather than building one car at a time, in line with the principles of artisanal craftsmanship, Fords would be produced with industrial efficiency, and sold by professional salesmen all over the country, ‘Ford people’ or ‘Fordites’ as the Ford Times liked to refer to them. Endless innovation in the manufacturing process led, by 1913, to the world’s first fully-fledged production line. Six years after the first prototype Model T had been built at the Piquette plant in Detroit, a single nine-hour shift at the much larger Highland Park plant assembled one thousand cars. The company estimated that it now produced one-third of all American cars.21 In keeping with the typically Fordist axiom that time equals money, a posed photograph of the entire 12,000-strong workforce of the Highland Park factory was reported as being the most expensive photograph ever taken, ‘costing many thousands of dollars for employees’ time and loss of production’.22

  Thus Henry Ford envisaged, evangelised, and came to personify an American economy of mass production and, crucially, mass consumption. A country brought up to believe itself a nation of tinkerers and inventors was made to see, in Henry Ford, one of their own. So while Ford himself ultimately became far richer than J. P. Morgan ever was, he was the acceptable, populist democratic face of American industrialisation where Morgan was its haughty, distant aristocratic face. Henry Ford may not have made Detroit, but his success supercharged its ascent – and changed America.

  Henry Ford’s vision of mass production and mass consumption did not arise from nowhere. It grew out of an American obsession with innovation and constantly improving productivity, and out of an infectious belief in material progress.

  In 1913, efficiency was an all-American cult. The tenets of the gospel of industrial efficiency were cited in Congress and in the country’s courts as revealed truths.23 Its prophets were hailed as bringers of a new American revolution. In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management, asserting that vast amounts of time and money could be saved by analysing and improving how holes were dug, or buildings built. Through scientific analysis – essentially photography and stop-watches needed for time and motion studies – the manufacturing process could be disaggregated into a series of similar, standardisable steps. These snapshot views of individual steps in the industrial process, studied, improved and then accelerated through time, would produce stupendous increases in productivity. (In the Made in Detroit exhibit of September, Taylorian ‘motion exhibits’ – otherwise known as films – showed Detroiters how individual products were manufactured.)

  Many of Taylor’s actual results were statistically spurious. Yet they appealed to managers now in a position to claim the authority of science over their workers. Basic Taylorian principles were applied to workplaces across America, chiming with wider notions of continuous improvement through learning, work and ingenuity. America in 1913 was awash with would-be inventors, who filled four pages of Scientific American: The Weekly Journal of Practical Information with announcements of patents for tyre inflaters, moveable cuffs and automatic plant seeders. With Taylor, as with Ford, scientific method, rather than God, would now light the way to industrial nirvana.

  And beyond. Another guru, Harrington Emerson, offered a home course of study in personal efficiency in just twenty-four lessons, available by writing to a New York address. In 1913, the Sears Roebuck catalogue advertised a range of labour-saving devices, from the cedar-wood High Speed Wizard Washer at $6.95 – ‘probably your neighbor has one’ – to the Eckhard Electric Suction Cleaner, available in both alternating and direct current designs to account for variations across the United States. ‘Make 1913 the electric year’, suggested an advertisement in the Los Angeles Times, accompanied by a picture of a single woman cooking on an electric hob, under an electric lamp.24

  Efficiency at home and at the factory was all very well, but with basic needs now so readily fulfilled, how would the economy be kept busy? The answer, the gurus argued, was much greater consumption, creating the demand that mass production could then supply. ‘Take your pencil – follow these figures’, advised N. A. Hawkins, the sales manager of the Ford Motor Company, walking his audience through the mathematics of mass consumption. There were a hundred million Americans, he reasoned, and twenty-five million families. Of these, five million could afford a new car, while existing automobile owners would buy new ones down the line. Conclusion: ‘Ford sales can never stop – they must increase!’25 A few years later, Ford passed the one million mark. ‘A million of anything is a great many’, Henry Ford told an adoring audience.26

  But Ford’s ambitions did not stop with a million, and did not stop with America. According to the Ford Times, ‘The Universal Car’ was the most popular automobile in Vladivostok, and elsewhere in Russia it was used by ‘two Grand Dukes and nineteen Princes’ as well as being inspected by the war department. The Model T turned up in China with a machine gun mounted on the back to protect a government official. Japan had already been ‘conquered’ with Ford’s service culture acting as the company’s forward artillery. The National Geographic described the delivery of a Ford, via the Gobi desert, to the ‘Living God’ (the Dalai Lama) of Mongolia. It was used on coffee plantations in Brazil and sheep farms in New Zealand. A cartoon showed a startled Martian looking through a telescope at earth – to see it swarming with Model T Fords.

  Ford learned his creed of mass consumption by looking around him – and studying its prophets. In 1907, Simon Nelson Patten had written of the ‘pleasure or surplus economy’ as a ‘new basis for civilization’.27 An age of relative plenty changed the meaning and purpose of economic life. ‘Cleanliness ceases to be the more or less onerous requirement’, Patten wrote, ‘and becomes a widening aesthetic joy in the scrubbed floors of the worker’s own house, the shining windows, the ebony stove, and in his well-washed children about a white-clothed table’. ‘Tawdry, unmeaning and useless objects’ became objects of affection in the home, and ‘the mark of superiority and success’ to oneself and to others. Leisure and meeting new aspirations – indeed creating and defining new aspirations – had become a growth business.

  The Sears catalogue of 1913 was eloquent
testimony for the emergence of a society of mass consumption, with new and varied tastes. At the more serious end of the scale, Sears offered gasoline engines, a range of ploughs, and almost everything else the American farmer could want or need to produce food in American quantities for American plates. For those who had recently left the countryside, Sears offered reminders of it in cheap reproductions depicting scenes from rural life: ‘Homeward Bound’, ‘Fishing’ or ‘The Old Homestead’. The patriotic could adorn their walls with carbon tints of Washington or Lincoln. Pyrography equipment for burning designs on to wood or leather would keep Americans busy on dark nights.

  Although in 1913 Sears abandoned the sale of patent medicines, for which it could vouch neither for their contents nor efficacy, it offered hundreds of other products intended to smarten or beautify. The Nu-Life Truss, for example, a men’s corset designed to force deep breathing, ‘creating perfect circulation and preventing decay’. Or an obesity belt ‘to give shape to the pendulous or relaxed abdomen’. There was special elastic for cyclists’ ankles, an ear cap to restrain children’s protruding ears, thirty types of soap, various cold creams, Carmichael’s Peroxide freckle ointment, Gervaise Graham’s Hair Color to dye hair, Princess Hair Tonic to grow it and De-Miracle Non-Irritant Depilatory to remove it. Sears carried a range of twenty face powders, many with Japanese names evoking the pale skins of Japanese women. The results could be contemplated in mirrors with German silver handles, or Parisian ivory, or anything in between.

  More frivolously, Sears offered two dozen types of doll (including Eskimo dolls), three different decks of cards for magic tricks, an eight-key toy clarinet, toy aeroplanes, German-made teddy bears, metal warships of different sizes, Ouija boards (known as Egyptian luck boards) and, in the year when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was protesting at racism in Washington, a ‘negro makeup outfit’ described as follows: ‘Consists of woven-black cotton hood and realistic large eyes, thick red lips and large teeth … A great item for masquerades or Halloween’.