The Model T, Assembly Line and Ford Workers
The Ford Model T would remain the industry giant with a total number of over 15 million cars produced by the time it was discontinued in 1927, to be replaced by the Model A. The burgeoning film industry would adopt the car as a comedic device, often using the Ford Model T in their chase scenes. The inclusion of the vehicle in the movies would help to put the car in front of a large number of Americans and would help to solidify it as a staple in the marketplace. The Model T held the record for the most produced car until it was dethroned in 1972 by the Volkswagen Beetle. The irony that the Beetle was Adolf Hitler’s version of an accessible car that the German people could afford is one that will be clear by the end of this chapter.
Among the innovations that Henry Ford was responsible for, the modern assembly line and the way that his workers were treated were the most notable. Henry Ford is often credited with the invention of the assembly line concept, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, assembly lines have been used throughout history, as seen in the fourteenth century Venetian shipbuilding complex. The Venetian production system was unmatched for the era, because their process could build a large merchant ship in just one day. Ford took the concept and modernised it for the industrial age. On 1 December 1913, Ford opened the first assembly line system to mass-produce his automobiles. Determined to always be in the lead of the automobile industry, Ford reduced the time that it took to produce a vehicle from twelve hours to only two and a half hours. His goal was to produce 1,000 cars per day. The parts could be created quickly enough, but assembly was time consuming. Ford’s assembly line concept made his dream a reality. The idea of each person doing a dedicated task helped the workforce become specialised, and therefore more efficient, in his or her job. This took the skillset of each worker down to one specific job, instead of many, which affected them when, and if, they chose to move on and work somewhere else. There were some that felt the assembly line removed the skill from the process and served to dehumanise the worker. The turnover rate in Ford’s factory was high, because the work was so repetitive. The cost to retrain and make a worker efficient was so high that Ford needed to take drastic action to maintain his process and costs.
The method by which Henry Ford treated his work force is also something to note. It was a vast improvement compared to the rough conditions that workers had experienced previously. Ford expected dedication and hard work, but he felt that to keep turnaround low it was necessary to raise the wages paid in his factory. In the year 1913 Ford had to hire 52,000 workers, but managed to retain only 14,000. The efforts required to train new workers were expensive and time consuming, causing issues with the workflow in the factory. Henry Ford made history on 5 January 5 1914 when he doubled his worker’s wages to $5 per day (approximately $119 or £82 today). This doubling of wages was a move that was unheard of for the era and made Ford’s factory the place that all of the top talent wanted to work. Ford also reduced the hours in the workday from nine to eight. The announcement had a huge impact, because the very next day over 10,000 workers lined-up outside of Ford’s factory looking for work. The move made international news, spawning thirty-five articles in the New York Times alone. On the other side of this coin, Ford was actually viciously opposed to labour unions.
A brief history of Ford’s efforts towards the workforce could seem like a win-win for everyone, except that, as with so much of Henry Ford, digging a little deeper unveils a more complicated view of the man and his methods and how they often seemed to circle back to his distrust of immigrants. The $5 per day wasn’t a wage that you would just walk off the street and get. It was actually an incentive wage and wasn’t guaranteed unless you met Ford’s rigorous requirements. Ford required his immigrant workforce to attend the company English school in order to become fully ‘Americanised’. It took six months to graduate ‘the pageant of the Ford melting pot’. The workers who completed the forced cultural appropriation training would all dress in stereotypical clothing from their country of origin and jump into a literal large pot and get stirred-up. The workers would then emerge wearing a proper American-style suit and a straw hat. It must have been quite a spectacle. The idea of Americanisation was far from something that Henry Ford invented. In fact, Americans had been practising a form of cultural assimilation when it came to Native Americans for hundreds of years prior to that. The idea behind it was to ‘civilize’ the Native Americans and adapt them to the European-American way of life, customs, clothing and education. This bigoted and ignorant process would effectively nullify their culture.
The Ford Sociological Department would also be sent to invade the personal lives of the workers to investigate the cleanliness of their homes. In KGB-like fashion, they would grill the workers to find out whether they sent money back to anyone ‘back home’, if they were really married, did they have any boarders in the house, and would even check to see if their water was clean. Henry Ford tried to socially engineer immigrants to force them to become his vision of an American citizen. It turns out that Ford actually used his $5 a day wage as a way to strip the foreign culture out of immigrants. After two failed inspections a worker was fired. That level of invasion of privacy and social engineering would be unheard of in today’s world.
Henry Ford eventually embarked on a massive public relations campaign, even going to the lengths of establishing the Ford Motion Picture Department to produce in-house features. It was in 1914 that they released their first movie in theatres titled How Henry Ford Makes 1000 Cars A Day. The self-promoting film presented Henry Ford as a simple everyman with simple tastes. Henry Ford was portrayed as hard working, like his workers, and a plain man that just likes to work on his farm.
The real Henry Ford was a peculiar dichotomy, he was a very wealthy man that was often photographed with his many celebrity friends and yet he enjoyed a reputation in the press as the everyman industrialist. This treatment would cause the ego of Henry Ford to grow. When it came to dealing with his employees, his ego would never allow him to fire anyone himself; that could damage his image. Instead, he would have the unsavoury task done on the sly. An employee could come in for work one day and their desk would have simply disappeared. Ford came to enjoy the power that he held over others, a position that would swell his own self-importance and convince him that his own judgement and opinions were impeccable and not to be questioned.
The Ford Motor Company Changes Hands
Henry Ford begrudgingly handed over the Ford Motor Company to his son Edsel in 1918, but that was far from the last time he would be involved in the decision making process. Ford would retain a high level of control in the company, eventually even tricking the stockholders into selling their shares to him and Edsel, which placed the control of the company back in the hands of the Ford family. Truly, Henry Ford would let Edsel only ostensibly run the company, while he continued to control and manipulate every aspect and even take the opportunity to humiliate Edsel from time to time.
The 1920s in America were full of change. There was new youthful music, dancing clubs and prohibition. The change was all over the roadways. There were suddenly so many cars, where there had been virtually none before. The roadways were often clogged and congested, but this new era brought an enormous amount of change. The automobile industry boom fuelled the rubber and oil industries, created gas stations, roadside motels, restaurants and of course the inevitable road construction and expansion. The sudden boom and use of the car changed vacation habits and even the way cities were set up. The younger generation had embraced the idea of the car as a tool of leisure and escape, a fact that the old fashioned thinker Henry Ford wasn’t fond of. The new generation of consumers would demand more detailed and flashy cars, along with new features. The Roaring Twenties were full of flash and style, a trend that Ford had no intention of carrying over into his own vehicles. The flagrant consumerism seemed to make him uncomfortable. ‘The American of a generation ago was a shrewd buyer’, Ford said, �
�but nowadays the American people seem to listen and be sold.’
Ford ignored the new marketplace and the inevitable happened…sales began to fall. The sales of Chevy/GM, by contrast, had tripled and were available in a variety of fresh, new colours. Ford didn’t want to make anything but the Model T. He held strong to the idea that his own vision was all that mattered, and it began to hold him back in the marketplace. The Model T had already become obsolete in the new world. Ford asserted, ‘The only problem with a Ford car is that we can’t produce it fast enough’.
Edsel Ford saw the need to make some major changes and finally went toe-to-toe with his father. The sleek Ford Model A was the first Ford car to be available on an instalment plan. Edsel was behind it, but Ford took the credit in the press. Edsel had to push to get it made. The Model A revived the company’s sales, with 700,000 cars sold in the first year alone. The relationship between Henry Ford and his son soured at this point, and would never properly recover. Henry couldn’t face that his baby, the Model T, was now obsolete; but the country was going through a major period of change. Rural America began to disappear, as more people were living in cities than on the farm.
The 1929 Stock Market crash deeply affected the city of Detroit and the auto industry. A wave of poverty and unemployment began to move across the country and soon the consumer was no longer there. In four years the automobile marketplace lost ninety per cent of its previous business. Ford tried to keep the workers solvent and raised wages to $7 per day, but Model A sales weren’t there anymore, so the layoffs came. The mayor of Detroit, Frank Murphy, estimated in the early 1930s that a third of the 200,000 people in the bread lines were laid off by Ford’s factories alone. Unemployed citizens would wait hours for just a small ration of bread during the difficult economic times. The former employees of Ford were hungry and would even take to the streets with other unemployed workers in hunger marches. An article published in Fortune at the time noted that ‘Declining sales have changed Mr Ford from one of the greatest U.S. money-makers to one of the greatest money losers.’ Ironically, the very same Fortune magazine would name Henry Ford as businessman of the century in 1999.
Henry Ford and the Unions
Henry Ford hated the idea of a labour union. He hated that they were a challenge to his power and his absolute authority over the way he chose to run his factory.
Ford employed a young man named Harry Bennett, an ex-Navy man, to control the River Rouge factory floor with his gang of armed toughs that kept strict grips on the employees. Bennett was a small man at only 5ft 7in, and weighing a spry 145lbs. Ford wanted the 24-year-old to act as his muscle at his Rouge factory. The men there were gritty and tough to manage and Ford needed someone who answered directly to him that could strong-arm the employees into subservience. Bennett wasn’t a disappointment; he and his men ruled the plant with an iron fist and loaded weapons.
Bennett kept a basement office at the Rouge, which included a secret door that could be opened by using a button underneath his desk. In this secret room, Bennett and Ford would have their meetings, with a guarantee of the utmost privacy. Bennett was a company man through and through, once boasting, ‘I am Mr Ford’s personal man.’ His dedication to Henry Ford was second to none. ‘If Mr Ford told me to blacken out the sun tomorrow, I might have trouble fixing it. But you’d see a hundred thousand sons-of-bitches coming through the Rouge gates in the morning, all wearing dark glasses.’
Bennett played the role of a gentleman gangster, recruiting a variety of athletes, ex-military and even ex-cons to his Ford enforcement department, dubbed the Service Department. The men, adorned with suits, fedoras and guns, used the threat of physical violence to keep the workforce in check. The rules in the factories became strict and overbearing. The workers weren’t allowed to talk to each other or even sit down. The workers became accustomed to the absurd rules that they even learned to speak to each other without moving their lips, hoping to avoid a beating at the hands of Bennett and his men. The workers referred to it as the ‘Fordization of the face’.
The National Labor Relations Act, also known as the Wagner Act, was passed in 1935. This new legal foundation gave workers the right to organise into unions, giving them the power to negotiate working conditions and wages. The Ford Motor Company was one of the last big companies to fight the unions. Bennett was authorised by Ford to take care of the union by any means necessary. The Service Department thugs attacked the union representatives when they came to the factory to hand out pamphlets. Images taken by photographers on the scene were soon published around the United States, showing evidence of the brutal nature of the battle that the unions were fighting. The restrictions in the Ford factory got out of control for a time. At one point, if men were seen talking in groups they were assumed to be unionising, were often beaten and subsequently fired. In April of 1941, 50,000 Ford workers protested outside the Rouge plant, pressing Ford to give in to the union demands for pay and conditions. Ford reportedly fumed that he would rather shut down his factory than give in to the union demands, but even Ford couldn’t ultimately stop the union. Ford’s son Edsel would step in as the voice of reason and strike a deal with the union, a move that Ford would resent.
Bennett became the trusted right-hand man of Henry Ford, which was likely a sore spot for his son, Edsel. When one man threatened Edsel’s life, Bennett assured him that he would handle the situation and the man turned up dead shortly thereafter. Bennett was clearly not a person to be crossed. Henry Ford eventually had Bennett spy on his son, who was living a lush extravagant lifestyle, which Ford hated. Edsel, an only son, soon began to see Bennett as a rival for his father’s affections, something that he gave out in very short supply as it was.
The Henry Ford who employed Bennett to control his workers was a far cry from the younger Henry Ford, who had been an eager pioneer and business mogul. No, this Ford was increasingly paranoid and angry. Ford felt that the world he knew was gone and that the country had lost control; he would often comment about how he yearned for yesterday. Ford didn’t mellow as he aged either, he continued to insist that the Jews were persecuting him and Edsel became concerned for his father’s state of mind and his ability to run the Ford Motor Company. Ford did suffer two mild strokes, one in 1938 and another in 1941; in 1945 however, he had another, far more severe, stroke that left him in a state of mental confusion. Edsel had died of stomach cancer on 26 May 1943, aged 49, so his son, Henry Ford II, took over as president of the Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford died on 7 April 1947 at the age of 83.
The Rampant Anti-Semitism of the Era
Around a million Jews lived in the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century; half were located in New York City. This is a stark contrast to the previous Jewish population in America, which had been 50,000 only a half-century before. The population would continue to grow rapidly with 1.75 million Jews immigrating to America between 1900 and 1924. The power and influence of the Jewish community in society and in politics began to grow significantly during this time, as they began to represent 3.5 per cent of the American populace. This was a huge change from the less than 1 per cent that Jews had represented prior to this era. In fact, the primarily East Coast Jewish population was such a presence that when Theodore Roosevelt was running for his first full term presidency in 1904, his campaign released pamphlets in Yiddish.
The Jewish presence had become so noticeably large in America that by the time the First World War rolled around, the armed forces began to cater especially to the Jewish population, trying to incite them to get involved in the war effort. On 9 April 1917, the Jewish Welfare Board was established, a mere three days after America officially declared its war on Germany. The purpose of the JWB was to support Jewish soldiers during wartime and to recruit and train rabbis, in much the same way that priests and pastors were provided to support the Christian soldiers.
It was during the time between the First World War and the Second World War that anti-Semitism would grow rapidly in the Un
ited States. The conditions of the Great Depression would exacerbate the growing resentment, and even violence, towards the American Jewish population, due to a perception that wealthy Jews and Jewish bankers were responsible for the stock market crash.
Another major opposition to the Jews at the time was the Ku Klux Klan. The first rise of the KKK was reactionary following the loss of the South to the North in the American Civil War. The KKK would only last for five years during that volatile era of American history, but would rise again in 1915 and last all the way to 1944, near the end of the Second World War. The original incarnation of the KKK was directly opposed to African American leaders and advancement, and while the second version was no fan of African Americans, their focus was more on the recent immigrants to the United States, focusing on Jews and Catholics. The numbers of the Klan grew exponentially, clocking in at over 4 million, far surpassing the entire Jewish population of America at the time.
One of the darker stories of anti-Semitism to come from pre-war America was the lynching of a Jewish businessman, Leo Frank, in Atlanta back in 1915. Frank was accused of murdering a worker in the pencil factory that he managed. The then governor of Georgia, John M. Slaton, commuted Frank’s sentence to life in prison instead of death row. This pardoning of a Jew incited a rabid mob that proceeded to break into the jail, drag Frank out into the street, and hang him. Evidence that was later brought to light showed that the very man who accused Frank of the crime, the pencil plant janitor Jim Conley, might have been responsible for the crime himself. Frank was given a posthumous pardon for the murder in 1986.
A Secret History of Brands Page 5
