American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The men standing at the moving assembly lines and toiling in the rolling mill, powerhouse, blast furnaces, and foundry were considered the elite of American industry, well paid, well housed, well treated by a benevolent employer. Life at the Rouge was not easy. They were part of an army—75,000 men worked at the sprawling facility by 1926—and they were treated much like soldiers. Amid an ear-splitting roar, they fought their daily battle of production standing often shoulder to shoulder, absolutely dominated by the flow of work, just as the flow of work had been carefully adjusted to them. Each man had enough space to do his work, no more. Men did not move; only materials. Each work unit, wrote an admiring observer, was “a carefully designed gear which meshes with other gears and operates in synchronism with them, the whole forming one huge, perfectly-timed, smoothly operating industrial machine of almost unbelievable efficiency.”

  The whole plant seemed in motion as parts flowed from scores of tributaries into the mighty central stream. Men seemed in constant motion from the waist up as they drilled, inserted, bolted, clipped, plucked parts from small bins at their side, moved in a precise series of steps to an exact and demanding time sequence. Mass production, according to company doctrine, reduced the “necessity for thought on the part of the worker and ... his movements to a minimum.” Thus workers were expected to act as efficiently and automatically as machines. Plant bosses, on the other hand, were not only allowed to move about but required to. They were given desks without chairs so that they had to work standing up, or preferably on the move. Casual conversations were frowned upon. An air of anxiety hung over the whole place as workers labored and bosses scrambled to meet the company injunction—produce, produce, produce.

  The man most in motion at the Ford works was Henry Ford himself. Still lean and sinewy as he entered his sixties, almost handsome, with his black eyes and slightly curling hair, he was bored by executive meetings, hardly able to sit still for more than a few minutes. Restlessly he toured his plants and yards, his bins and his foundries, sharp to spot men engaged in idle chatter or executives stuck to their desks, praising or upbraiding with brief words and rapidly gesturing hands. Even on holidays he was restless, hurrying. Camping in the Smokies with his old friend Thomas Edison, he was surprised when the inventor felt his hip pocket. “What are you looking for?” Said Edison: “I figure you always carry a lighted bunch of firecrackers in your clothes somewhere. Slow to a walk for a while, will you? I get tired of motion pictures.”

  By the early twenties, Henry Ford was already a legend, both in the popular press and in the automobile industry. The public drank in the stories—how as a young genius mechanic he had experimented with light-car Models A and B and K at a time when automobiles were big and their owners wealthy; how he had worked out audacious mass-production techniques for building hundreds of thousands of Model Ts; how he had fought off Wall Street bankers who were trying to dominate the automobile industry through patent control; how he had sent a Peace Ship to Europe in 1915 to end the war; how he had fought off his own associates and stockholders so that he could establish personal control of his company; how he had made several hundred million—or was it a billion?—dollars; and how, above all, he had suddenly announced in 1914 that every Ford worker would receive at least five dollars a day, to the delight of auto workers and the consternation of his rivals.

  What impressed Americans most was Ford’s independence. In an age of monopoly and trusts, he steered clear of combination and stuck to his last—making cars and tractors. In an age that preached individualism more than it practiced it, he was the supreme individualist—a man who could tell bankers, suppliers, union bosses, rivals to go to hell. This perception was accurate. Thwarted by strikes against his glass and steel suppliers, and by miners and railroad workers, he resolved to control the source of his raw materials—of the timber that went into his car bodies, the iron mines that produced ore for wheels and axles, the glass that made car windows, the leather for interiors, the coal that fed his towering furnaces. By 1915, with his Highland plant a huge success, he had resolved on building a far bigger works at Rouge—an integrated works that would combine a multitude of auto-building processes, resting on a vertical organization of production. Raising colossal amounts of capital from his own profits, and some from bankers, Ford simply bought up enormous tracts of land, timber, iron fields, waterpower rights, limestone, and silica sand.

  So that ore-bearing vessel easing into the slip belonged personally to Henry Ford, as did the cargo ship headed out to Europe and South America packed with his cars and tractors, as did canals and railroads and ports and harbors. He planned for the future, too, requiring that branch plants be set up next to waterways in case other men’s railroads should fail him. Ford wanted independence because that to him meant power—power to do as he wished. And he had few doubts about what he could do through his own talents if only rivals or incompetents did not stand in his way.

  Ford would control not only raw materials but men’s lives as well—and not only their working lives but, to a degree, their home lives, too. To make sure that his five-dollars-a-day wage would not be wasted—or worse—Ford established the Sociological Department, whose main task was to encourage workers toward “thrift, honesty, sobriety, better housing, and better living generally.” At this time, the company was employing thousands of immigrants from Poland, Russia, Romania, Italy, and other less industrialized areas of Europe. Over a hundred staff members from the Sociological Department visited workers’ homes to inspect for uncleanliness, bad habits, congestion, undernourished children, drunkenness, gambling. “Employees should use plenty of soap and water in the home, and upon their children, bathing frequently,” a Ford pamphlet advised. “Notice that the most advanced people are the cleanest.”

  The result was a clash of cultures—between the immigrants’ pre-industrial living and working habits and Ford’s Puritan ethic of hard work, clean living, and efficiency. Ford’s paternalism reflected a pervasive fear that the immigrants would not only waste their five dollars a day but flaunt it. A veiled warning came in a condescending verse from the Detroit poet Edgar Guest about “Giuseppe,” who goes out promenading with white collar, silk hat, cane, and Ford badge on his lapel:

  He smok’ da cigar weath da beega da band,

  Da “three-for-da-quart” ees da kind;

  Da diamond dat flash from da back of hees hand,

  Eez da beegest Giuseppe could find.…

  For Giuseppe, he work at da Ford.

  If the company’s “sociologists” had limited impact on the workers’ home lives, Ford had more control of their working time. Within his plants he established “Americanization” classes that taught English, table manners, cleanliness, proper attire, and even etiquette, as well as Ford shop practices. “Graduation” took the form of a pageant depicting immigrants descending from a boat down a gangway into a fifteen-foot-wide “melting pot” representing the Ford English School. But the clash of cultures could not be resolved; and, inevitably, Ford’s paternalism had its ugly side. Vexed above all by absenteeism, the company sacked almost a thousand Greek and Russian workers who as Orthodox Christians celebrated Christmas thirteen days after the regular holiday under their own Julian calendar. “If these men are to make their home in America,” a Ford official stated, “they should observe American holidays.”

  Still, as historians noted, immigrants tended to cling to their ways—to the crowded tenements, the noisy sociability, the relaxed hours, even the “squalor.” After a few years, the sociological and Americanization programs were dropped. While these programs did have a certain impact on the wider social scene—the 16,000 workers who graduated from the Ford schools served as models for many local and national “Americanization” efforts directed at immigrants—Ford, in the end, found that he had less power over men than over machines.

  All told, however, Henry Ford had emerged by the mid-1920s as one of the country’s supreme transforming leaders. He belonged, concluded a bio
grapher, “to that small company of historical personalities who literally transformed the world of their time.” Not only did he make it possible for millions of Americans to own cars, not only did he develop the moving assembly line as a fundamental part of the total production process, help put the nation on wheels, and force a vast expansion of the highways his “flivvers” rode on; he also reshaped the home locations, recreation habits, social intercourse, even the language of tens of millions of working people. Thus he “altered the contours of society” as much as he “permanently changed the topography of cities and nations.”

  It was not that Ford had a direct influence on politics or government. On the contrary, on almost every occasion where he moved outside his industrial orbit he failed, sometimes dramatically. Thus his Peace Ship—a 1915 cruise to Europe with Jane Addams and other pacifists—not only failed but made him something of a laughingstock. An ardent supporter of Woodrow Wilson, he moved with the President from pacifism to war mobilization, in which he had a prominent role, and then went down with Wilson and the League. He rashly accepted the Democratic nomination for United States senator from Michigan, only to be beaten by what he viewed as “Wall Street money” and by a free-spending Republican candidate who later was found guilty of violating the federal corrupt practices act. He published his own weekly, the Dearborn Independent, but this venture turned sour when Ford used it for anti-Semitic propaganda, in part because for a time he imagined a “Jewish control” of banking. His most bizarre and humiliating experience resulted from a libel suit he launched against Colonel Robert R. McCormick’s Chicago Tribune for calling him an unpatriotic “anarchist” during the war. After a long proceeding, during which Ford was put on the stand and exposed as ignorant of American history, a jury of farmers found the Tribune guilty but fined it six cents—a deliciously satisfying verdict for the Colonel.

  Like many transforming leaders, Ford was a bundle of contradictions. He believed in “pragmatic,” ad hoc, day-to-day decision-making, and yet carefully and brilliantly planned one of the biggest and most complex production layouts in the world. He demanded absolute discipline from the work force, but made a special effort to employ not only unlettered immigrants but handicapped persons and ex-convicts. He led his company into historic advances but also setbacks, such as refusing to paint Model Ts anything save black, long delaying the shift from the Model T to the Model A, and holding an almost obsessive bias against hydraulic brakes. He practiced centralized and disciplined management, but preached old-fashioned smallness and, indeed, during the early twenties built a number of small factories—called Village Industries—to produce sub-assembly parts. He was almost impossible to work with or under, but he brought to industrial leadership a number of men who would become giants in the automotive industry—notably William S. Knudsen and Charles E. Sorensen. Ford, someone said, was able to assemble everything except himself.

  ‘‘Ford runs modern society and not the politicians who are only screens,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1924. The novelist was only partly right. Ford enormously influenced social and political attitudes through his Model Ts, his pervasive company propaganda, and his own example. His influence was worldwide; Europeans coined the term “Fordismus” for the idea of mass production, industrial efficiency, and cheap consumer goods, and even the Russians hailed him and his tractors as symbols of the kind of modern industry needed to build socialism. But the automaker found out the hard way that economic power was not directly convertible into political power. A financial loner, a political independent, an erratic innovator, Ford was far more a throwback to the days of the Carnegies and Rockefellers than a forerunner of the modern capitalist in politics. The future lay with the bankers and businessmen and brokers who would make up the transactional leadership of mid-twentieth-century America.

  “The Business of America …”

  During the 1920s the Republican leaders and the business leaders of the nation—often the same men—conducted a crowning experiment in America’s capitalistic brand of conservatism. Assured and determined, for ten years they had the almost unfettered opportunity to convert their individualistic rhetoric, pro-business beliefs, and corporate power into public policy and governmental action. No opponent could obstruct them as they worked in their economic and political laboratory. The conservative leaders did not, of course, view their efforts as experimental; on the contrary, they assumed that they were bringing the nation back to “normalcy”—back to old moorings, established wisdoms, and the proper conduct of affairs after the radical Wilson years. Hence the period was not a mere interregnum between the New Freedom and the New Deal, but witnessed a major venture with its own powerful impact on American history and American democracy.

  An extraordinary political continuity and consistency marked that decade. Throughout, Republicans remained firmly in control. Whether the Democrats nominated a moderate liberal and internationalist in 1920, or a conservative in 1924, or an Irish-Catholic city man in 1928, the Grand Old Party racked up its nearly two-to-one popular majorities and its three-or four-to-one electoral college majorities throughout the decade. The Republicans kept control of Congress, even during the “off-year” House and Senate elections of the 1920s.

  The Republicans nominated and elected three Presidents, each with a distinctive image and style. Harding in the White House continued to be very much the same man as in the Senate—a poker-playing, golf-addictive, tobacco-chewing, mistress-keeping, whiskey-drinking politico who concealed a good deal of political sophistication and grasp of policy behind an affable, glad-handing front, and a quick intelligence and lazy, undisciplined mind behind his Hollywood-presidential appearance—silvery hair, square jaw, expressive mouth, big frame, high paunch. Calvin Coolidge seemed almost his opposite—a small, spare man, as austere and hard-looking as some of his native Vermont granite, taciturn in public though garrulous enough when he wanted to be. Herbert Hoover, who had won warm admiration from Republicans and Democrats alike, and from acute observers such as Brandeis and Lippmann, for his competent and compassionate handling of wartime relief, was a remarkable administrator, both well organized and imaginative, who could launch major new ventures and write a sophisticated tract, as he did on individualism, with equal skill. All three men had small-town origins, but they had been shaped by diverse subcultures—Harding by the boom town of Marion, Coolidge by the staid political and business world of Northampton, Hoover by years as an engineer and promoter overseas and at home.

  In broad political outlook, on the other hand, the three Presidents were much alike. At his first Cabinet meeting after Harding’s death in August 1923, and later to press and Congress, Coolidge stated that he would continue all his predecessor’s policies. Hoover in turn carried on most of Coolidge’s initiatives, at least until new imperatives arose. All three chief executives were under the same institutional constraints. The presidency had its own direction and dynamics, as foreign demands and bureaucratic pressures played on the White House. Even the easygoing Harding was moving toward a more modern and coherent program in the last year of his brief presidency, and Coolidge, in Robert Murray’s words, was able to be the President that Harding would have liked to have been. Undergirding all three Administrations, moreover, was the power of the Republican party. No single “boss” could tell Presidents what to do, but the collective leadership, triumphant self-confidence, and policy and patronage demands of the Grand Old Party set the course of all three Administrations.

  Presidential Republican rule showed the most continuity in its top executive leadership. Secretary of State Hughes served during both the Harding and early Coolidge years, as did a number of other Cabinet officers. Coolidge as Vice-President sat in Harding’s Cabinet, Hoover as Secretary of Commerce in both Harding’s and Coolidge’s. After the long patronage drought during the Wilson years, GOP leaders in Congress and the country put intense pressure on all three Presidents for Republican appointments. But of all the forces for continuity through the 1920s, nothing co
uld compare, in intensity and effect, with that of Andrew William Mellon.

  Andrew Mellon. The star of no leader was to shine so brightly in the 1920s, nor fade so quickly into darkness thereafter. Born in 1855, Mellon had grown up in a Pittsburgh banking family drenched in affluence, education, gentility, conservatism, and Republicanism. Everything Mellon touched, as he rose in banking and industry circles, turned to money. Taking over his father’s bank at the age of twenty-seven, Andrew helped establish the Aluminum Company of America, Gulf Oil, and Union Steel, then moved on into manufacturing, shipbuilding, public utilities. He helped Marshall-McClintick become world-famous as builder of the Panama Canal locks, the Hell Gate and George Washington bridges, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. But at heart he always remained a banker. By 1920, he was reputed to be one of America’s richest men—perhaps the richest—with a fortune of several hundred millions.

  He was an austere figure amid the flamboyant politicos of the day— reticent, soft-voiced, with a long narrow head and chilly gray-blue eyes on top of a small, slight frame tightly buttoned into a dark suit. It was considered a master stroke on Harding’s part when the new President was able to persuade this diffident multimillionaire to come to Washington as Secretary of the Treasury. Coolidge, who admired wealth, was delighted to keep him on as Treasury Secretary, as was Hoover despite earlier disagreements with him in the Cabinet. He rivaled all three Presidents in his influence over economic policy.