The steelworker mobilization took place against the background of an extraordinary national wave of strikes, the largest in U.S. history proportional to the size of the workforce. Unions sought to maintain their wartime organizational gains and increase wages to keep up with inflation, while companies fought to roll back union advances and reestablish their dominance. Four million workers—one fifth of the workforce—took part in the strike wave, which included a general strike in Seattle, a police strike in Boston, a telephone operators strike in New England, an actors strike in New York, and, at the end of 1919, a strike by four hundred thousand coal miners. Everyone, it seemed, was walking off the job.65
The leaders of the steel-organizing drive hoped to avoid a strike, fully cognizant of the power of the companies. But Elbert Gary, the leader of U.S. Steel and effectively of the whole industry, rejected all requests for negotiations, even a private one from President Wilson. With workers increasingly restless and the companies firing activists, on September 22, 1919, the National Committee, feeling it had no alternative, launched the first national steel strike in American history. Within a week, some 250,000 workers—half the industry workforce—stopped work.
In a reversal of the usual past pattern, the strike was strongest among immigrant and unskilled workers, though many skilled workers supported it as well. In some regions, like Chicago, Buffalo, Youngstown, and Cleveland, the strike was nearly 100 percent effective, forcing the mills to shut down. But at the Bethlehem Steel plants, strike leader William Z. Foster estimated only about half the workers went out, while in the Pittsburgh area, the most important, the strike was 75–85 percent effective. In the South, it barely made a dent.
The companies fought back hard. Wherever they could, they kept plants in token operation, even if unprofitable, bringing in white scabs from Northern cities and black scabs from the South. State police, deputy sheriffs, private guards, and vigilantes operating on their behalf launched what Foster termed a “reign of terror.” Pickets and organizers were arrested and driven out of town, mounted police attacked picketers and demonstrators and even a funeral procession, rallies were banned, strikers were shot. In Gary, the governor declared martial law and 1,500 regular Army troops occupied the city. A score of people were killed during the conflict, almost all strikers or their sympathizers, and hundreds were seriously injured.66
To a greater extent than in previous industrial battles, both sides recognized the importance of public opinion to the outcome. Company propaganda portrayed the worker action as not an industrial dispute but an attempted revolution, playing on the antiradicalism that came in reaction to the Russian Revolution. Foster’s past record of radicalism was uncovered and widely publicized. The anti-Red, anti-strike campaign had a decidedly nativist tone, as it portrayed immigrant strikers as “un-American.” The press generally supported the companies, while the Wilson administration, by then in sharp retreat from its wartime progressivism, failed to back the strikers, leaving them on their own in taking on the most powerful companies in the world.67
Slowly the employers began increasing production, as some workers, at first mostly skilled, began returning to their jobs and new workers were recruited and trained. Tens of thousands of strikers stuck it out into the winter. But on January 8, 1920, the National Committee acknowledged the futility of going on, ordering its members to return to work in what Foster himself called an “unconditional surrender.”
The 1919 strike had been a test of the ability of organized labor to penetrate the great national manufacturing companies, backed and controlled by the most powerful financial interests. Its failure meant that for another generation the largest and most advanced factories in the United States would remain nonunion and their workers outcasts.
Yet even as it remained a fortress of industrial autocracy, the steel industry maintained its allure, even among those with little sympathy for the owners. The scale, power, and elemental processes of steelmaking commanded attention separate from the social arrangements that surrounded them. Neither the fierce discontent of labor, nor the well-documented dangers and difficulties of work in giant factories, nor the massive accumulation of power in the hands of the plutocracy that owned them dented the enthusiasm, cutting across the political spectrum, for the processes and products of the steel and other manufacturing industries, so proudly displayed at the world’s fairs. Mary Heaton Vorse, who volunteered as a publicist for the strikers in 1919 and was a model for one of John Dos Passos’s characters in his account of the clash in The Big Money, was far from alone when she wrote a year later, “I would rather see steel poured than hear a great orchestra.” The steel mill had become the modern sublime.68
CHAPTER 4
“I WORSHIP FACTORIES”
Fordism, Labor, and the Romance of the Giant Factory
IN A 1926 ENTRY IN THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA, Henry Ford (or the publicist who ghostwrote the article) defined “mass production” as “the modern method by which great quantities of a single standardized commodity are manufactured.” If anyone knew about the manufacture of “great quantities of a single standardized commodity,” it was Ford. His Model T, introduced in 1908, turned the automobile from a luxury plaything into a mass-consumer good. Prior to then, automobile companies typically manufactured at most a few thousand cars a year. By 1914, the Ford Motor Company was rolling out nearly a quarter of a million Model Ts annually. By the time the company stopped selling the iconic model in 1927, fifteen million had been produced.1
Henry Ford’s worldwide fame stemmed as much from the methods his company used to make the Model T as from the car itself. To manufacture it, the Ford Motor Company built some of the largest factories that ever had been seen and introduced countless technical and organizational innovations, including the assembly line, which enormously increased the speed and efficiency of production. To control the tens of thousands of workers who populated its plants, the company devised new methods of labor management that extended beyond the factory walls into workers’ homes and minds. Ford pioneered what amounted to a new political economy of inexpensive consumer products that transformed people’s lives, high-volume factories to produce them, and high wages and strict controls to discipline the workforce. Before Ford himself popularized the term “mass production,” commentators often spoke of “Fordism,” “Ford methods,” or the “Ford system,” appropriate terms for the new production, distribution, and consumption regime, for it was Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company that ushered in a new phase of industrialization and a factory scale that would be unsurpassed for nearly a century.2
Just as the “factory system” of early nineteenth-century England captured the interest and imagination of journalists, political activists, writers, and artists, so, too, did the “Ford system” of the twentieth century. Once again, it seemed like a new world was aborning. Part of what made Fordism so transfixing was the promise of a wholesale rise in the standard of living and amelioration of the class conflict that had been shaking the United States. In 1924 merchant and reformer Edward Filene wrote that in Fordism lay “a finer and fairer future than most of us have even dared to dream.” Beyond the social implications of Fordism, many writers, painters, filmmakers, and photographers were entranced by the physical structures in which it unfolded. More than with earlier industrial production, artists and intellectuals explicitly linked Fordism to modernist trends in art and society. The great photographer Margaret Bourke-White, who through her work in Fortune and Life magazines did more than any other individual to popularize industrial imagery, captured the age when she bluntly declared “I worship factories.”3
The Road to Mass Production
The Ford system was a culmination of past manufacturing practices and a radical break from them. Almost from the start, American factories had been engaged in the production of “great quantities of a single standardized commodity,” be it the white sheeting made in Waltham or the rails that drove the expansion of the iron and steel industry. But automobile
s were of an entirely different order of complexity. It was a long road to enable such complicated machinery to be produced on a mass scale.
Fordism built on two manufacturing innovations, interchangeable parts and continuous flow. Until the early nineteenth century, products with interacting metal parts, like guns or clocks, were individually made by skilled artisans, who spent a great deal of time fitting together parts, filing and adjusting them to make sure they worked together. No one finished product was exactly like the next.
The standardization of parts occurred first in the United States. Generally, introducing interchangeable parts initially increased the cost of production, since it required a huge investment in specialized machines, tools, jigs, and fixtures and a great deal of experimentation to achieve the tolerances that made it possible to assemble a product from a pile of parts without custom fitting. The key innovations took place before the Civil War in New England armories. The military greatly valued the ease of repair allowed by interchangeable parts and cared less about costs than private manufacturers. “Armory practice” slowly spread to the making of clocks, sewing machines, typewriters, agricultural equipment, bicycles, and other civilian products.4
American conditions promoted standardization and interchangeability. A mass market existed that justified heavy capital investment and that was hard to take full advantage of without uniformity. In 1855, 400,000 brass clocks were produced in the United States. During the Civil War, three million rifles were used.5 A shortage of skilled workers and relatively high wages made it expensive and sometimes impossible to produce complex products in large quantities using traditional artisanal methods. With interchangeable parts, skilled workers were still needed to build specialized machinery and tooling, but less skilled workers could churn out parts and assemble them.6
None of this was easy to achieve. The Singer Manufacturing Company, one of the most celebrated manufacturers of its day, illustrated the challenge. Well before the Civil War, the company emerged as a leader in the sewing machine industry, selling a high-priced model made with traditional metalworking techniques. During the war, Singer began mechanizing, but it would take almost two decades before the company fully achieved interchangeable parts. In the interim, it expanded by hiring more and more workers to make parts using some specialized machinery and employing fleets of fitters, who filed and adjusted them. The factory Singer erected in Elizabethport, New Jersey, in 1873 was reportedly the largest in the United States making one product in a single building. Journalists wrote about it, tourists visited it, it appeared on postcards. Along with a second Singer plant in Scotland, it produced an extraordinary 75 percent of the world’s sewing machines. Yet even when in 1880 the company was turning out a half million machines a year, they were still assembled, like almost all complex metal products at the time, by carrying all the needed parts to workstations where workers assembled one machine at a time, filing and finishing when less than true interchangeability had been achieved.7
Continuous flow operation ultimately led to a radically different approach to assembly. The idea of keeping material moving as workers conducted various operations first developed in industries handling liquid or semiliquid products, most notably oil refining. Grain milling, brewing, and canning came next. But the industry that apparently had the greatest influence on Ford was meatpacking, where the disassembly of animals was done by hanging newly killed carcasses on an overhead conveyor, moving them from worker to worker, each of whom made a particular cut or removed particular pieces, until the animal had been reduced to smaller chunks of meat that might then undergo further processing. Implicit in continuous flow processing was an intense division of labor; each worker performed just one or a few operations on something going by or momentarily standing still, rather than many operations on a stationary object.8
Ford began experimenting with continuous assembly in 1913, five years after introducing the Model T. Henry Ford had been born during the Civil War, to a farm family in Dearborn, Michigan, near Detroit. Beginning as a machine shop apprentice, he worked his way up through a variety of jobs before becoming the chief engineer in Detroit for the Edison Illuminating Company. He built his first car in 1896, proving his models’ worth by racing them. He founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903 with investors who supplied the capital needed to take on the expensive business of making automobiles. In 1907 he wrested control of the firm from his partners. Aiming at rural America, Ford conceived of the Model T as a lightweight vehicle, sturdy enough to withstand the terrible roads that farmers depended on but simple enough for them to repair themselves and for him to produce at a price they could afford.9
Sold through a network of independent distributors, the Model T proved an instant hit. Sales zoomed from 5,986 units in 1908 to 260,720 in 1913, as the price of the touring model dropped from $850 to $550 ($13,629 in 2017 dollars).10 Part of the reason Ford could make so many cars and sell them so cheaply was product standardization. “The way to make automobiles,” Henry Ford said, “is to make one automobile just like another . . . . just like one pin is like another pin when it comes from the pin factory, or one match is like another match when it comes from the match factory.” Ford, perhaps unconsciously, echoed Adam Smith’s famous use of pin manufacturing in The Wealth of Nations to illustrate the savings that could come from the division of labor in producing a standardized product. From 1909 on, the Ford Motor Company only produced the Model T. The vehicle’s different body styles all used the same chassis. For most of its history, it was available only in black.11
With just one model produced in high volume, Ford could invest heavily in equipment and experimentation to manufacture it as efficiently as possible. The tremendous profits the Model T generated freed him from depending on outside investors or Wall Street—which he despised—to expand his plants and add new machinery. Ford toolmakers developed specialized fixtures and jigs to simplify and speed up operations. One machine simultaneously drilled forty-five holes into engine blocks from four sides, replacing the numerous setups and operations needed for the same result using traditional methods. The adoption of single-purpose machinery also helped ensure that tolerances would be met for interchangeability and easy assembly. The company boasted that “You might travel round the world in a Model T and exchange crankshafts with any other Model T you met enroute, and both engines would work as perfectly after the exchange as before. . . . All Ford parts of the same kind are perfectly interchangeable.”
Specialized machines also were a strategy to deal with the severe shortage, high wages, and union orientation of skilled workers in the Detroit area as the automobile industry took off. Ford engineers called their jigs and fixtures “farmers’ tools,” since they allowed new workers to produce high-quality parts, lessening the need for skilled machinists and their craft culture. (Preferring workers with no craft background had a long history among American manufacturers; arms maker Samuel Colt once said “the more ignorant a man was, the more brains he had for my purpose.”) The Ford company also made extensive use of stamped parts, a practice adopted from the bicycle industry, cheaper and easier than casting and machining.12
For most of the nineteenth century, standard machine shop practice had been to group machines together by type—all lathes in one area, drill presses in another, and so on—which required a significant expenditure of manpower to move pieces from one area to another as the production process proceeded. By the early twentieth century, the most advanced manufacturers, including the Olds Motor Works, which made the Oldsmobile, and Ford began what Ford called “the planned orderly progression of the commodity through the shop.” Placing machine tools, carbonizing furnaces, and other equipment in the sequence in which they were used reduced the time spent on transporting unfinished parts and made immediately obvious where holdups were occurring. Here was a spatial embodiment of the logical flow Marx saw in the mid-nineteenth century when he wrote that in a “real machinery system” “[e]ach detail machine supplies raw material to the
machine next in order.”
At Ford, progressive placement of machinery went hand in hand with an ever-greater division of labor. Each workstation was manned by a worker who did only one or a few tasks, usually simplified by the creation of equipment designed to do just those operations, over and over again. The gains in productivity were enormous. In 1905, with three hundred workers, Ford produced twenty-five cars a day; three years later, with some five hundred workers, it rolled out one hundred.13
Next came installing mechanical devices to move parts from one workstation to another, rather than doing so by hand, applying continuous flow processing to complex manufacturing. In 1913, Ford began experimenting with a conveyor system in its foundry and with slide rails and tables for assembling magnetos and transmissions, having workers stand still while parts for processing or assembling moved past them. Before the new system was installed, it took a single worker about twenty minutes to assemble a magneto at a stationary workbench. After Ford introduced what would become called an assembly line, splitting up the process into twenty-nine separate steps, it took fourteen workers a cumulative time of five minutes to make a magneto, a fourfold increase in productivity.14
Inspired by the enormous savings, Ford engineers turned to the assembly of chassis and finished cars. Originally, Ford assembled its cars following the standard practice for manufacturing complex machinery: “we simply started to put a car together at a spot on the floor,” Ford recalled, “and workmen brought to it the parts as they were needed in exactly the same way that one builds a house.” Other early automakers also used the “craft method” of assembling vehicles on stationary sawhorses or wooden stands.
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