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

by Greg Grandin

  The murals comprise two major panels, along with a series of minor ones, mixing techniques drawn from cubism and futurism, social realism, classical and Renaissance art, and traditional Aztec, Mayan, and Olmec motifs to depict over fifty major Rouge operations. The courtyard’s north wall features towering spindles, casting boxes, sand blasters, rolling mills, and all of the ovens and machines needed to make the recently inaugurated V8 engine and transmission. In the background looms a volcano-like blast furnace, illuminated by flares of yellow, red, and orange. Rivera called the making of steel a thing of “plastic beauty,” as “beautiful as the early Aztec or Mayan sculptures.” The south wall mural, which depicts the finishing work of making a car, the stamping, pressing, welding, painting, and testing, is more restrained in terms of color and technique. Elsewhere in the courtyard, Rivera portrays other elements of the Rouge, its aviation and boat production, railroads, and powerhouses.

  Unlike the haunting, unpeopled work of Charles Sheeler, who around the same time was capturing the Rouge in a series of widely publicized photographs and paintings, Rivera’s frescoes are jammed with overall-clad workers—painters, welders, forgers, female spark plug testers, and even accountants—all the human energy that went into building a car. Productive motion is conveyed by contraposition. On the north wall, men, particularly those in the foreground, all seem to be bending backward, their muscular bodies pulling one thing or another. On the south, they lean forward, into their work. “I thought of the millions of different men by whose combined labor and thought automobiles were produced,” Rivera said in his autobiography, “from the miners who dug the iron ore out of the earth to the railroad men and teamsters who brought the finished machines to the consumer,” conquering “space and time” and winning “ever-expanding victories . . . against death.”

  Rivera, the Marxist, painted a few notes of dissent, including a small panel depicting workers leaving the factory over the pedestrian overpass where Bennett’s men had gunned down the hunger marchers. While everywhere else in the murals humans run into one another, with no clear line fully separating one person from the next, suggesting connectivity and solidarity, here the solemn processional figures are distinct, implying that the alienation other critics of capitalism attributed to assembly production begins, for Rivera, at the factory’s exit. The general mood of the frescoes celebrates determination, portraying workers energized by strenuous activity rather than enervated by machines. Rivera himself took great pride when an engineer representing a group of Chrysler workers praised him for capturing the essence of the production process, fusing “together, in a few feet, sequences of operations which are actually performed in a distance of at least two miles, and every inch of his work is technically correct.” The only thing missing, another group of workers told Rivera, was the factory whistle.

  From Charles Sheeler’s 1927 series of River Rouge photographs. “The silence is awesome,” wrote historian Leo Marx of another of Sheeler’s works. “By superimposing order, peace, and harmony upon our modern chaos, Sheeler represents the anomalous blend of illusion and reality in the American consciousness.”

  How Rivera managed this compression is the point where his frescoes move from merely representing the Rouge to embodying the idea behind it. Fordism is defined as an industrial process that breaks down the human movement that goes into making a product—in Ford’s case a car—into its simplest component and then uses assembly lines to choreograph that movement to achieve maximum efficiency. It is a process that is impossible to observe sequentially over time, that is, by following the steps needed to transform raw material into finished product, since Fordism in its totality combines multiple subassembly processes that take place simultaneously—like a “river and its tributaries”—before converging in a main trunk line. Rivera achieved this effect by applying the medieval technique of polyscenic narrative, in which multiple scenes are placed together in a unified space. Such polyscenic narration usually tells a story over time, with the same characters appearing in different scenes that take place chronologically, that is, one after the other. The Detroit murals, however, illustrate specific tasks taking place in different places during a single moment, compressing into an integrated visual image the Rouge’s intense interconnectivity and unrelenting flow. While medieval painters separated scenes with columns, archways, and windows, Rivera made use of Albert Kahn’s snakelike conveyor belts and steel girders to move viewers from one discrete job to another, from foregrounded die and press workers to the foundry men deep in the painting’s recesses, the whole thing backlighted orange by the forge fire.11

  If Rivera’s two principal panels sought to freeze in a single instance the multiple, simultaneous motions needed to produce a car (a defining feature of modernism is its reduction of experience to an explosive “now”), he also, in a series of surrounding paintings, revealed an appreciation of the millennia it took to produce both the raw materials and the human labor needed to make a Ford car. Above each of the two main frescoes are narrow oblong frames depicting geological sedimentation, layers of rock, fossil, crystals, limestone, crustaceans, and sand—in other words, the prehistory of much of the raw materials that fed the Rouge’s forges, ovens, and furnaces (as well as the frescoes themselves, as tons of sand and limestone were needed to mix plaster and pigments). Elsewhere, Rivera included what could be a scene from an Upper Peninsula forest and a rubber tree being harvested by what appears to be Brazilian tappers (though no Fordlandia latex had yet made it to the Rouge). And at the top of the walls, above the oblong geological panels, Rivera painted four nude females, allegorical representations of the world’s great races, which produced the workers needed to extract the resources from the earth. In both style and sentiment, these allegories connect Rivera’s Detroit frescoes to his Mexican murals, which often contained idealized, romantic portrayals of the glories of Aztecs or Olmecs, progenitors, in Rivera’s epic visual history, of Mexico’s revolutionary nationalism.

  Auto workers thought the only thing missing from Diego Rivera’s Detroit murals was the factory whistle.

  Neither Rivera nor Ford saw a contradiction in celebrating the power of machinery and science while at the same time idealizing a lost past. Ford shared Rivera’s sense that his factory resulted from the collision of multiple time frames: industrial, geological, mytho-historical. Influenced by the eclectic spiritualism of his time, as well by his favorite author, Ralph Waldo Emerson, he repeatedly voiced beliefs that resonated with Rivera’s upper panels—in reincarnation, in the existence of an “over-soul” composed of the accumulated experience of past lives, in the idea that “memory never dies.” “We remember things from past lives in our present life,” and not just individually but collectively, Ford said. He believed that the earth had nourished and lost many civilizations over millions of years—like Rivera’s Aztecs and Olmecs—and that the knowledge produced by these civilizations had, in some mystical way, been handed down, culminating in the advancements of modern industry. “What survived is wisdom—the essence of experience.”12

  RIVERA LOST HIMSELF not just in the River Rouge in preparation for his Detroit murals but also in Greenfield Village, Ford’s elaborate homage to rural America. By the time the Mexican painter arrived in the Motor City, Ford had added antique collecting to his many other late-in-life passions. He had begun acquiring historical curios since at least 1906, when he started buying pieces of Edisoniana, anything to do with the life and work of his mentor and friend Thomas Edison, as well as copies of his beloved childhood school textbook, William Holmes McGuffey’s Eclectic Reader. But collecting became a much more intense occupation following his humiliating 1919 trial, which was convened to settle a suit he filed against the Chicago Tribune for calling him an “anarchist.” Ford’s lengthy testimony became the talk of the country, as newspapers reported on his apparent illiteracy and his ignorance of historical events such as the American Revolution and the War of 1898. Asked to say who Benedict Arnold was, Ford replied: “He’
s a writer, I think,” prompting hoots of laughter from the courthouse audience. It was around this time that he first proclaimed that “history is bunk,” an opinion he would repeat throughout the 1930s and 1940s. “I say history is bunk—bunk—double bunk,” he said in 1940. “Why, it isn’t even true.”

  Ford was condemning not so much all references to the past as a particular interpretation of history, one that emphasized great men and their deeds. As historian Steven Watts has noted, Ford saw history in “surprisingly modern terms,” not as an “empirical recovery of absolute truth but as interpretations of the past.” If history was being “rewritten every year from a new point of view,” how then, he asked, could “anybody claim to know the truth about history?” Ford’s answer was to reject “great-man” history in favor of an account rooted in the slow evolutionary changes that occur in the “everyday life and work of ordinary people.” He might not have been able to say what the War of 1898 was, but Ford was sure that stories of the kind that hailed the heroics of Theodore Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill, even if they were true—which he doubted they were—had little to do with what drove progress. “The real history of a people was not expressed in wars,” he said, “but in the way they lived and worked. . . . The history of America wasn’t written in Washington, it was written in the grass roots.” And any history book that celebrated “guns and speeches” but ignored the “harrows and all the rest of daily life is bunk,” Ford insisted.13

  Driving home from the trial, which he won, though the six-cent settlement he received was more a rebuke than a vindication, Ford turned to his secretary, Ernest Liebold, and said, “I’m going to start up a museum and give people a true picture of the development of the country.” He also soon decided to build a town to go with the museum, asking without any prior conversation Edward Cutler, an architect in his employ, to draw him plans for a village. It was, said Cutler, “purely imaginative.”

  Over the next decade, Ford became the most famous antique collector in the world. Crates arrived daily in Dearborn, filling up the bays and warehouse of Building 13 of his now vacant tractor plant (production had been moved to the Rouge). Trucks and Michigan Central boxcars delivered anything one could imagine related to the mechanical or decorative arts—cast-iron stoves, sewing machines, threshers, plows, baby bottles, scrubbing boards, saucepans, vacuum cleaners, inkwells, steam engines, oil lamps, typewriters, mirrors, barber chairs, hobby horses, fire engines, kitchen utensils, Civil War drums, trundle beds, rocking chairs, benches, tables, spinning wheels, music boxes, violins, clocks, lanterns, kettles, cradles, candle molds, airplanes, trains, and cars. “We are trying,” Ford told a New York Times reporter, “to assemble a complete series of every kind of article used or made in America from the days of the first settlers down to now. When we are through we shall have reproduced American life as lived.”14

  In October 1927—just a few days after Pará’s legislature ratified Ford’s Tapajós concession—Ford began work on both his town and his museum, modeled on Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, to house and display his collection. Bulldozers cleared a two-hundred-acre lot and leveled off a knoll overlooking the Rouge River and workers started to lay the foundation for the Martha-Mary Chapel—built with bricks from the church where Clara and Henry were married and named after their respective mothers. Just upstream lay Ford’s Fair Lane estate, a few miles downriver stood the Rouge factory, and the new town was built almost in the shadow of the smokestack crown of the complex’s Powerhouse No. 1—eight chimneys as harmonious in their proportions as the eight columns holding up each of the Parthenon’s two façades. “Life flows,” Ford liked to repeat, but he would have a say in its course. Just as Blakeley and Villares were felling the first trees at Boa Vista, surveyors squared the site of a village green and workers began to lay railroad tracks and reassemble the scores of buildings that had been shipped from all over America—an 1803 Connecticut post office, the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop, Abraham Lincoln’s Illinois courtroom, Luther Burbank’s botanical lab from California, Edgar Allan Poe’s New York cottage, the homes of Patrick Henry, Daniel Webster, and Walt Whitman, Ford’s childhood family farm, the Detroit shed where he built his first gas-powered “quadricycle,” and, of course, Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratories.15 Ford named the settlement Greenfield Village, after his wife’s childhood county, which by then had been absorbed by Detroit’s sprawl.

  Ford demanded historical faithfulness, ordering his engineers to rescue as much original detail from the structures and their surroundings as possible. For Edison’s Menlo Park complex, he had seven boxcar loads of red clay shipped from New Jersey, along with the stump of an old hickory tree that was on the grounds. “H’m!” said Edison upon seeing the restoration, “the same damn old New Jersey clay!” Greenfield Village had everything that one could imagine as defining an American town before the arrival of Fordist mass production—a town hall, schools, a fire station, a doctor’s office, a blacksmith, covered bridges, clapboard residences with neat flower gardens, and even liquor bottles (filled with colored water) in the inn’s taverns, which Ford the teetotaler only grudgingly allowed after being urged by his wife. There was one detail, though, one mainstay of nineteenth-century small-town America, that Ford refused to replicate: a bank. The Ford Motor Company may have been forced to go into the lending business by setting up its Universal Credit Corporation, but Ford’s vision of Americana would remain pure. His Main Street would stay forever untainted by Wall Street.16

  Many in the press judged Ford’s antiquarianism with contempt, pointing out the irony of the man singularly responsible for the disappearance of small-town America now claiming to be its restorer. “With his left hand he restores a self-sufficient little eighteenth-century village,” wrote the Nation, “but with his right hand he had already caused the land to be dotted red and yellow with filling stations.” “It was,” said the New York Times, “as if Stalin went in for collecting old ledgers and stock-tickers.” The New Republic chimed in: “Mr. Ford might be less interested in putting an extinct civilization into a museum if he had not done so much to make it extinct.” And many intellectuals were particularly disapproving of his museum. Ford refused to consult curators to guide his collecting (even as in the Amazon he was forswearing botanists to help with his rubber plantation). One assistant remembers that Ford was “afraid of bringing in experts whose opinions might run counter to his.” When his museum finally opened, it looked like, as one historian put it, “the world’s biggest rummage sale,” organized with no rhyme or reason.17

  When an interviewer asked Edward Cutler, the architect of Greenfield Village, rendered above in a 1934 tourist map, if it was true that “just out of the clear sky one day, Ford asked you to draw a village,” Cutler replied “yes.”

  There was, however, logic at work. The vision of technological progress on display in Ford’s museum and village—from the crafts era through mechanical steam engines to industrial manufacturing—was obviously self-serving, ending in the revolution in mass production that he presided over. Yet there is also a deep weariness revealed in this vision, a distrust of the flash of consumerism that had overtaken the American economy, driven by dotted-line loans and the induced demand of “trumpery and trinkets,” as Ford put it, goods which performed “no real service to the world and are at last mere rubbish as they were at first mere waste.” Conceived during the roiling twenties when his company was forced to adopt yearly model changes and easy loans, Greenfield Village and its museum, along with Ford’s obsessive, massive collecting of material goods and historical buildings, was an antidote to the fetishism of cheap consumer products that had overtaken the economy, and the hucksterism that sold them. The stock market crash and the onset of an intractable depression, followed by the aftershocks of successive banking crises, only heightened Ford’s desire for solidity. The items in his village and museum embodied the social relations and knowledge that went into making them, preserving the essence, in fact th
e breath—when it opened, his museum displayed Thomas Edison’s last exhalation, captured by his son in a test tube at Ford’s request—of a more durable American experience. “We learn from the past not only what to do but what not to do,” Ford once told an interviewer. “Whatever is produced today has something in it of everything that has gone before. Even a present-day chair embodies all previous chairs, and if we can show the development of the chair in tangible form we shall teach better than we can in books.” He said that one shouldn’t “regard these thousands of inventions, thousands of things which man has made, as just so many material objects. You can read in every one of them what the man who made them was thinking—what he was aiming at. A piece of machinery or anything that is made is like a book, if you can read it. It is part of the record of man’s spirit.”18

  DIEGO RIVERA DIDN’T share the scorn other intellectuals and artists heaped on Greenfield Village. During his stay in Detroit, Rivera visited the model town, wandering around its streets, houses, mills, and workshops from seven in the morning to one thirty the next. He recognized its sense of proportion and how it related to the nearby River Rouge plant. “As I walked on, marveling at each successive mechanical wonder,” he recalled in his memoirs, “I realized that I was witnessing the history of machinery, as if on parade, from its primitive beginnings to the present day, in all its complex and astounding elaboration.”19

  The holism that Rivera identified in Ford represents a particular kind of pastoralism, an American pastoralism that didn’t oppose nature and industrialization, or man and the machine, but saw each fulfilling the other. Much of Ford’s faith that industry and agriculture could be balanced and that community would be fulfilled rather than overrun by capitalist expansion drew specifically from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet it’s a conviction that had deep roots in American thought. As historian Leo Marx has pointed out, with the exception of the Southern slave states, American history reveals little opposition to mechanization and industrialization. America itself, Marx wrote, has often been held up by many of its celebrants as a machine in the New World garden, representing both a release of historical energy through the “seizure of the underlying principles of nature” and a domestication of that power through its Constitution—described as a “machine that would go of itself,” a self-regulating, synchronized system of checks and balances.20