But nothing touched the Rouge in sheer scale. Historian Lindy Biggs characterized it as “more like an industrial city than a factory.” In 1925 it had 52,800 workers, still trailing Highland Park, where the workforce had swelled to 55,300. With the Model A, though, the Rouge moved ahead. It peaked at 102,811 workers in 1929, a level of employment entirely unprecedented at a single factory complex. To this day, at least in terms of the size of its workforce, it remains unmatched in the United States. It was, simply, the largest and most complicated factory ever built, an extraordinary testament to ingenuity, engineering, and human labor.41
Celebrating Ford
Ford methods attracted widespread interest among industrial professionals as soon as they were introduced. Henry Ford welcomed reporters, especially from the technical press, into his factories, openly sharing details about his latest innovations, a departure from the usual wariness among manufacturers about releasing information about their techniques. Trade journals like American Machinist, Iron Age, and Engineering Magazine ran extensive articles about the methods developed to produce the Model T. Other American automobile companies and consumer goods manufacturers quickly adopted the assembly line.42
The general public was likewise fascinated by the Ford system, especially the assembly line. Henry Ford realized that public interest in the methods of making Ford cars could help sell them. In addition to providing tours of the Highland Park plant, he took the assembly line on the road. At the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, just two years after the assembly line had been introduced, a Ford exhibit included a working production line that turned out twenty Model Ts a day. When in 1928 Ford unveiled the Model A at Madison Square Garden, the company put up displays of every facet of the production process, from dioramas of Ford iron and coal mines to workstations for making glass and upholstery. At the 1933–34 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition, part of the Ford Exposition Building, designed by Albert Kahn and later moved near the entrance to the Rouge plant, showed “the complete production of the car in all its parts.” In 1938, nearly a million people visited the display. And they flocked to the Rouge itself, too. In the late 1930s, Ford offered a two-hour tour of the complex starting every half hour. Other manufacturing firms, including Chrysler and General Motors, also opened their plants and set up exhibits for a public endlessly fascinated with how things were made, especially with the complex, wondrous choreography of the assembly line. The Kahn-designed General Motors Exhibit at the Chicago Exposition featured a model production line, which allowed visitors on an overlooking balcony to watch workers assembling vehicles.
The public romance with the giant factory and the assembly line proved long-lasting. In 1971, 243,000 people visited the Rouge, a record number. A few years later, the U.S. Department of Commerce published a list of plants in the United States that offered tours. It ran to 149 pages, with everything from distilleries to steel mills, including a dozen auto plants.43
Intellectuals and political activists were caught up in the allure of Fordism, too. Perhaps surprisingly, given Ford’s later reputation as a union-hating, conservative autocrat, some prominent leftists at first praised the Ford system. In early 1916, after visiting the Highland Park plant, Kate Richards O’Hare, a well-known socialist leader, published two articles in The National Rip-Saw, a mass circulation socialist monthly, praising Henry Ford. O’Hare saw the Five Dollar Day, the Sociological Department, and the Ford English School as advancing the lot of workers (along with Ford’s decision to take the power to fire away from foremen). Using a jarringly racist simile, she wrote that as a result of Ford’s policies “men freeze to a job in the Ford plant like a negro to a fat possum.” “If every Capitalist in the United States were to suddenly become converted to Ford’s ideas . . . it would not solve the social problems, eliminate the class struggle or inaugurate the co-operative commonwealth, BUT it would advance the cause of social justice, demonstrate the soundness of the socialist theories and bring the mighty pressure of education to hasten the final and complete emancipation of the working class.”44
Later that same year, John Reed, soon to be the most important chronicler of the Russian Revolution and a founder of the American Communist Party, wrote a similarly glowing if more sophisticated portrait of Ford in the left-wing journal The Masses. Ford’s strategy of low prices and high wages, especially the profit-sharing built into the Five Dollar Day, for Reed represented a huge step forward from normal industrial practices. Reed detailed the difference high wages made in the lives of Ford workers. Beyond that, after interviewing Ford, he came to believe that the auto giant was moving toward some sort of new form of corporate control that would give workers a say; the Five Dollar Day was “turning into something dangerously like a real experiment in democracy, and from it may spring a real menace to capitalism.” This was why, Reed believed, “capitalists hate Henry Ford,” an echo of Ford’s own perception of himself, in the Populist idiom he grew up around, as a producer of value having to fight off the parasitic financiers of Wall Street.45
Left-wing praise for Henry Ford diminished over time, in part in response to changes in his company’s practices and his rabid anti-Semitism during the 1920s; Edmund Wilson, writing fifteen years after Reed, dubbed him the “despot of Dearborn.” But Fordism struck a strong chord with a group that during the New Deal would ally with elements of the left, businessmen and their supporters who saw mass consumption as critical to maintaining prosperity and profits. Edward Filene, who made his money in department stores, was perhaps the most outspoken member of those who have been dubbed “proto-Keynesians” for seeing the need for mass purchasing power to maintain economic growth. Unlike in the past, Filene wrote in 1924, businesses needed to produce “prosperous customers as well as saleable goods.” Fordism, with its promise of high wages and cheaper products, was a way to create a virtuous circle of mass purchasing power, mass consumption, mass production, and economic growth. Unlike O’Hare and Reed, Filene acknowledged the monotony of Fordist labor, but saw shorter hours as partially ameliorating the problem. And, in any case, “every man is not an artist, every man is not a creative craftsman.” “Poverty brings a monotony a thousand times more deadly to body and mind than the monotony of factory routine,” he added in a comment reminiscent of W. Cooke Taylor’s remark about child labor eighty years earlier.46
Novelists, too, saw in Fordism a startling development, a step into a new type of world. John Dos Passos profiled Ford in The Big Money (1936), which concluded his great three-volume portrait of the country, U.S.A., writing not only about the Model T and the exhausting labor used to produce it but also the automaker’s many contradictions, his pacifism, war profiteering, and anti-Semitism, his revolutionary inventions and antiquarianism. (Alfred Kazin shrewdly observed that U.S.A., with its complex structure composed of different types of narrative building blocks, was itself a “tool,” “another American invention—an American thing peculiar to the opportunity and stress of American life.”)47 Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who visited a Detroit Ford factory in 1926, included a scene of working on the company assembly line in Journey to the End of the Night (1932). Upton Sinclair wrote a not very good novel about Ford, The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America (1937). And most famously, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) depicts a dystopia of Fordism, a portrait of life A.F.—the years “Anno Ford,” measured from 1908, when the Model T was introduced—with Henry Ford the deity.48
Dos Passos, Sinclair, Céline, and Huxley all wrote about Ford and Fordism during the 1930s, well after the initial burst of journalistic and industrial excitement over mass production. Their work was colored by the Great Depression and the Ford Motor Company’s violent antiunion actions, which radically changed the public image of Ford and the Fordist project. By contrast, the key visual depictions of Fordism began earlier, during the 1920s. More than in the written word, it was in the visual arts that Fordism and the giant factory were celebrated.
Giant Factories and
the Visual Arts
Factories had been portrayed from their earliest days in drawings, lithographs, and paintings. But only in the twentieth century did the factory become an important subject for artists. It is difficult to think of a truly great eighteenth- or nineteenth-century artistic representation of a factory, but there are plenty of great twentieth-century factory paintings, photographs, and films. For many artists during the 1920s and 1930s, the factory represented modern life—secular, urban, mechanical, overwhelming—a break from the rural landscape or intimate domestic interior. And it provided a vehicle for modernist modes of artistic representation, moving toward abstraction. While in the nineteenth century, novelists and other writers played a major role in shaping public perceptions of the factory and the factory system, in the twentieth century, visual artists came to the fore.
Photography, in particular, took the lead in influencing public perceptions of the giant factory. Itself a product of the Industrial Revolution that created the factory system, photography allowed the easy reproduction and dissemination of imagery, while painting remained an inherently elite form, largely created for private viewing by collectors or museum goers. It was fitting that photography and film, so well suited to the creation of unlimited identical products, proved the most important media for the representation of mass production.
Early in the twentieth century, a number of American photographers, including Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, and Alvin Langdon Coburn, began taking pictures of machinery, machine parts, and industrial landscapes. By the 1920s, photographers and artists elsewhere—purists in France, futurists in Italy, Bauhaus affiliates and Neue Sachlichkeit photographers in Germany, constructivists in the Soviet Union—also had turned to industry for visual ideas, symbols, and a machine aesthetic.49 But photographing actual factories, especially their interiors, presented formidable technical problems in an era of large, heavy cameras, a limited choice of lenses, slow film, and primitive lighting devices. The photographer who first overcame many of the challenges and did more than any other to disseminate images of giant industry was Margaret Bourke-White.
Bourke-White’s father, an engineer and inventor, worked for a printing press manufacturer. He often took Margaret, while a child living in New Jersey, to the plants where presses were being made or installed. She later wrote of the first time he took her to a foundry, “I can hardly describe my joy. To me at that age, a foundry represented the beginning and end of all beauty.” Her lifelong fascination with industry was linked to her intense feelings for her father, who died when she was only eighteen. “I worshipped my father,” she wrote. “Whenever I go on a job, I always see machinery through my father’s eyes. And so I worship factories.”
Bourke-White moved to Cleveland in the mid-1920s to try to make a go of it as an architectural photographer, documenting upscale homes and gardens. But she found herself drawn to the Flats, the smoky, dirty, noisy district in the heart of the city that housed heavy industry. “Fresh from college with my camera over my shoulder, the Flats were photographic paradise.”
Soon Bourke-White was selling exterior shots of industry to a local bank for its house publication. But getting inside factories was another story; Cleveland industrialists, like most factory owners, had no interest in allowing outsiders inside. Her break came when the head of Otis Steel gave her access to his mill. With a confidence beyond her years, she pronounced to him “that there is a power and vitality in industry that makes it a magnificent subject for photography, that it reflects the age in which we live.” She had come to believe that “Industry . . . had evolved an unconscious beauty—often a hidden beauty that was waiting to be discovered.”
After five months of experimenting with camera positions, lighting, film, and darkroom technique, Bourke-White managed to capture the drama of molten steel being poured. Otis Steel bought her prints, and other industrial commissions began coming her way. For the stage set of Eugene O’Neill’s play Dynamo, she photographed the generators at the Niagara Falls Power Company. Years later, when she reprinted the image, she wrote in the caption, “Dynamos were more beautiful to me than pearls,” quite a statement for a woman devoted to stylish looks and expensive clothes.50
In 1929, Henry Luce, the publisher of Time, hired Bourke-White for his new business publication, Fortune. A lavish, heavily illustrated magazine, with some of the top writers and designers in the country, Fortune provided sophisticated documentation, celebration, and analysis of American business. Its photographers, including Bourke-White, had access to the largest and most advanced industrial complexes in the country. In 1930, she photographed the Rouge. Four years later, she took pictures at Amoskeag Mills, where years earlier Lewis Hine had photographed child workers.
Bourke-White’s audience expanded exponentially when Luce shifted her to his new “photo-magazine,” Life. The cover of the first issue, dated November 23, 1936, was a Bourke-White photograph of the spillway of the world’s largest earth-filled dam, the Fort Peck Dam in eastern Montana, a masterpiece of formal, nearly abstract composition and human-dwarfing scale. Within months, Life was selling a million copies a week, with Bourke-White one of its stars.
In her early industrial photographs, Bourke-White displayed little interest in workers. Often they are totally absent. When present, they seem negligible compared to the huge structures and machines that dominate her pictures. This effacing of workers from industrial imagery was a common characteristic of photographs and paintings during the 1920s and early 1930s (in Europe as well as the United States), a sharp contrast to the earlier work of Hine. Though Hine sometimes showed machines dwarfing humans, emphasizing their large scale and abstract shapes, the bulk of his work centered on the human experience of labor, on the faces, bodies, and expressions of the workers who inhabited the industrial realm. For Bourke-White, at this stage of her career, it was not the worker who held her interest, nor the products being made, but the abstract forms of industry. “Beauty of Industry,” she wrote in 1930, “lies in its truth and simplicity.”51
Charles Sheeler, who beat Bourke-White to the Rouge, shared her credo. “I speak in the tongue of my times,” he said in 1938, “the mechanical, the industrial. Anything that works efficiently is beautiful.” “Our Factories,” he declared, “are our substitutes for religious expression.” A precisionist painter from Philadelphia, whose early work included the magnificent, abstracted urban landscapes Church Street El (1920) and Skyscrapers (1922), Sheeler took up photography as a way to support himself while painting. His commercial work included photographs for a Philadelphia advertising agency, N. W. Ayer & Son, which the Ford Motor Company engaged to promote the introduction of the Model A. Vaughn Flannery, the Ayer art director, working with Ford, decided to sell the new car by portraying the giant machines and factories used to manufacture it. Flannery sent Sheeler off to the Rouge, where he spent six weeks producing an extraordinary portfolio of images. Most of the photographs depict steelmaking and stamping processes, with their giant equipment and elemental drama. There are no photographs of assembly operations. Many of the images appear nearly abstract, with chimneys, conveyors, pipes, and cranes cutting across the picture plane, often at dramatic angles. Workers are entirely absent in many photographs and barely visible, at the edges of the frame, in others. As in some of Bourke-White’s photographs, when humans are present they serve to make evident the massive scale of the equipment and buildings near them (not dissimilar to the relationship between man and machine in illustrations of the Corliss engine at the Centenary Exhibition).
Figure 4.3 Charles Sheeler’s striking photograph of the Ford River Rouge factory, Criss-Crossed Conveyors—Ford Plant, 1927.
“The Flannery Ford campaign,” wrote architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson, “was the first to portray a beauty and heroism in the manufacturing process in order to spur sales. The Rouge ads started a fad, as many advertisers found that industrial views could be used in popular, mass-circulation magazines as well as in trade journals.” Flan
nery shrewdly realized that the giant factory, with its Promethean grandeur, represented a modernity with which consumers would want to associate themselves.52
While Ford made use of Sheeler’s Rouge photographs for advertising, some were presented as art objects. Sheeler himself used them in a photomontage exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. He also produced a series of paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints of the Rouge. The best-known paintings, American Landscape and Classic Landscape, were not studies of individual factory buildings but vistas of the complex. Both realistic and abstract in their concentration on form, line, and light, the near absence of people in Sheeler’s depictions of an industrial plant which had tens of thousands of workers gives an eerie air to the paintings. The critic Leo Marx wrote of American Landscape that Sheeler “eliminated all evidence of the frenzied movement and clamor we associate with the industrial scene. . . . This ‘American Landscape’ is the industrial landscape pastoralized.”
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