In depicting few people on the Rouge site, Sheeler was being literal. Other observers noted that, counterintuitively, very few people could be seen outside the factory buildings in many parts of the highly mechanized complex. But Sheeler also was making choices about what to depict. After World War II, he did a series of paintings of the by then-shuttered Amoskeag Mills. Hine’s Amoskeag photographs portrayed young workers. Bourke-White’s captured the symmetry and repetitive patterns of the machinery. Sheeler’s Amoskeag paintings were again landscapes, with no person in sight.53
Art historian Terry Smith criticized Bourke-White and Sheeler for “banishing productive labor, excluding the human, implying an autonomy to the mechanical, then seeking a beauty of repetition, simplicity, regularity of rhythm, clarity of surface. This is the gaze of management at leisure, marveling at the new beauties which its organizational inventiveness can create.” Smith has a point. After all, Bourke-White’s first clients were business leaders who wanted beautiful images of the buildings and facilities they controlled, before she moved on to a broader audience of business readers at Fortune. Edsel Ford bought Classic Landscape. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., bought American Landscape.54
But to leave it there is to miss the greatness of this art. Bourke-White’s subject was not the control of industry by capital; it was the grandeur of the structures of industry and the processes of production. Her photographs celebrate the power and creativity of humanity as manifested in industrial forms and the transformation of intractable materials. In her early work, the creations of workers effaced the workers themselves or at least diminished them. But over time, her interest in workers and the impact of industry on them grew. For Fortune, she photographed not only factories but skilled artisans, laborers, and industrial workers. At the Rouge, she had groups of workers informally pose for her. Her cover story for the first issue of Life documented not only the Fort Peck Dam but also the boomtown that grew up for the workers building it. One of her most striking images is of workers relaxing at a local bar. Her 1938 Life photographs of a Plymouth factory documented men at work.55
In his Rouge photographs, Sheeler was even more concerned with form and geometry than Bourke-White, creating stunning formal compositions (some of which did include workers). He, too, had a central concern with power, as Fortune recognized when it commissioned him to create six paintings on the theme for its December 1940 issue. But if Sheeler’s industrial photographs have a cool, triumphal feel, his industrial paintings, with their near absence of humanity, have a melancholy air, reminiscent of Edward Hopper in their light, treatment of shadow, and emotional tenor. These are far deeper and more ambiguous images than simple celebrations of possession.56
During the 1920s and 1930s, other painters besides Sheeler found a rich subject in large-scale industry, many lumped together under the label of precisionism, including Elsie Driggs (who did a painting of the Rouge in 1928), Charles Demuth, and Louis Lozowick. Lozowick, a self-conscious leftist who had extensive contact with the European and Soviet avant-garde, defended the portrayal of industrial machinery “more as a prognostication than as a fact” of the time when “rationalization and economy” would be “allies of the working class in the building of socialism.” Other painters, like Stuart Davies and Gerald Murphy, adopted what has been dubbed a “machine aesthetic,” though they never made industrial structures themselves their subject. But the artist who best captured the world of heavy industry, and the Rouge in particular, was not a precisionist but rather a Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera.57
Diego Rivera and Detroit Industry
Automaking turned Detroit into a boomtown. As workers poured in to take factory jobs, the population more than tripled, from 466,000 in 1910 to 1,720,000 in 1930, and the city sprawled. The newly enriched industrial captains built their mansions in lakeside suburbs and took it upon themselves to endow the city with the civic and cultural institutions that mark centers of power. Among them was the Detroit Institute of Arts, owned by the city but overseen by a small board, which was headed by Edsel Ford and included Albert Kahn and Charles T. Fisher of Fisher Body.58 In 1930, the ambitious museum director, William Valentiner, commissioned Diego Rivera to paint two murals in the courtyard of its new building. The artist, already well known in international art circles, at the time was working on his first murals in the United States. Valentiner convinced Edsel Ford, whom he tutored in art history, to finance the project.
By the time Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo, arrived in Detroit in April 1932, it was a very different place than when Sheeler had taken his photographs five years earlier. The Depression had hit the city hard, with mass unemployment in the auto industry and severe deprivation in the working-class neighborhoods. Radical movements had swelled, demanding jobs, relief, and unionization. On March 7, 1932, Ford guards and Dearborn police opened fire on a march of unemployed workers and their supporters, killing four and wounding many others. A funeral procession for the slain attracted sixty thousand marchers.
Though a self-identified Marxist and sometimes communist, Rivera (and Kahlo, too) seemed oblivious to the ferocious class conflict. Instead, he was entranced by Henry Ford and the industrial empire he had built. “My childhood passion for mechanical toys,” he later wrote, “had been transformed to a delight in machinery for its own meaning for man—his self-fulfillment and liberation from drudgery and poverty.” Rivera admired the photographs of industrial equipment that Kahlo’s father, a prominent Mexican photographer, had taken. The artist toured a variety of Detroit-area factories, but like for so many others it was the Rouge that captured his imagination and became the centerpiece of his work. Rivera grew so enthusiastic that Valentiner and Edsel Ford agreed to enlarge the commission to cover all four walls of the museum courtyard (at double the original fee), with twenty-seven panels providing space for a huge pictorial program, which, in accordance with Edsel’s wish, included not only the Rouge but also scenes from other locally important industries.59
Figure 4.4 Left to right: Albert Kahn, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera at the Detroit Institute of Arts on December 10, 1932.
Rivera completed the murals in mid-March 1933, the very low point of the Great Depression. While he and his assistants had worked on them from heavy scaffolding, groups of visitors had watched, much like the tourists at River Rouge, whom Rivera incorporated into one of his panels. Even before they were unveiled, the murals were subject to attacks of all kinds. But they proved immensely popular—thousands came the first week to see them—and they have remained one of Detroit’s premier attractions ever since.60
Detroit Industry is one of the triumphs of twentieth-century art, the most fully realized visual representation we have of the factory system. The two largest panels depict with remarkable visual compression the complex process of automobile manufacturing at the Rouge. The north wall panel shows the production of transmission housings and V8 engines (just recently introduced by Ford), from the blast furnace through casting, drilling, and assembly. The south wall portrays the stamping and finishing of steel car bodies and the final assembly line. Visually dense, with conveyors, pipes, cranes, and balconies serpenting through the panels, Rivera’s Rouge, unlike Bourke-White’s or Sheeler’s, teems with people: workers toiling, supervisors and tourists watching, and Henry and Edsel Ford, Valentiner, Rivera himself, and—thrown in for good measure—Dick Tracy all standing by.61
Figure 4.5 A detail from the north wall of Detroit Industry, a series of frescoes completed by Diego Rivera in 1933.
As remarkable as the Rouge panels are, they are only part of a larger array, epic in its conceptual and visual sweep. Other panels depict the miracle of modern medicine, the constructive and destructive sides of the aviation and chemical industries, huge figures representing each of the races, fruits and vegetables illustrating the bounty of the earth, and even the earth itself, with its stratifications and fossils and a fetus within it. While most of the Rouge workers have the faces and bodie
s of European Americans or African Americans, other figures, including two remarkable giant portraits of nude women representing the bounty of agriculture (in the upper corners of the east wall) are indigenous Mexicans in face and body, a fusion of two countries and two cultures in Rivera’s vision of modernity.
Human labor and machines co-dominate the Rivera mural. The toll that Fordism took on workers is evident in a predella panel of their tired bodies trudging across an overpass on their way home. But in its totality, the mural celebrates the strength of man and machine, the power seized from nature by mankind and harnessed in the giant factory.
Only in one tiny detail does an explicit critique of Ford appear, a hat worn by one worker that reads “We Want,” no doubt a reference to the union movement then gaining power in Detroit and ferociously resisted by the company. Rivera, though, could not contain his disdain for capital (though not for the Fords, father and son, whose company he seemed to genuinely enjoy). As soon as he finished Detroit Industry, he headed to New York to create a mural in the newly completed Rockefeller Center. His refusal to remove portraits of Lenin and of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., with a drink in hand and women nearby led the Rockefellers to destroy the work.
Rivera also had been commissioned to create a mural entitled Forge and Foundry for the Kahn-designed General Motors exhibit at the upcoming Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago. The architect, who initially had not been enthusiastic about commissioning the Rivera murals at the Institute of Art, had come to strongly defend them. But after the Rockefeller Center controversy, General Motors ordered him to fire Rivera. Kahn promised the artist to “do my best to get permission for you to proceed,” but the auto company did not relent. Rivera told the press, “This is a blow to me. I wanted to paint men and machinery.” Returning to Mexico, he hardly ever did again. Fordism and the giant factory lost their greatest chronicler.62
Ironically, and tellingly, today the most widely seen image of the Rouge in high culture is probably neither the Rivera murals nor Sheeler’s work but a painting by Frida Kahlo. When she came with Rivera to Detroit, Kahlo was almost completely unknown as an artist, but while in the city she produced a number of works that eventually came to overshadow Rivera’s mural in the global art world, just as her overall reputation came to overshadow his. In her best-known work of the period, the extraordinary painting Henry Ford Hospital, the Rouge appears as visual and topical background to the central image of a bleeding Kahlo lying in bed after the miscarriage she had in Detroit (probably induced as an abortion). Among other things, her painting is a premonition of the shift of cultural interest in North America and Europe away from industry toward intensely personal, inward concerns.63
The Tramp in the Factory
In terms of sheer popularity, the premier visual representation of Fordism and the giant factory was not a painting or photograph at all, but Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times, released in 1936. Mass production had long fascinated the filmmaker, by then one of the country’s best-known celebrities. In 1923 he had visited Detroit, touring the Highland Park powerhouse and assembly line with Henry and Edsel Ford as his guides. Years later, trying to come up with a way to cinematically deal with the misery caused by the Great Depression and more broadly with the machine age, the Ford factory provided inspiration. In the last major silent film to be made in Hollywood, Chaplin utilized what already was an archaic technology to critique mass production, mass consumption, and the capitalist crisis. (The film has a sound track, but the only voices heard come from mechanical devices until, near the very end, we finally hear Chaplin’s voice, singing a nonsense song with no intelligible words.)
From the very first frame—a picture of a clock face—Chaplin presents the demands of industrial discipline. In a long early sequence, his character, the Tramp (his long-standing film persona, though in this film identified as “A Factory Worker”), works on an assembly line tightening bolts for a never-seen product. Funny and horrifying, the workers struggle to keep up with the line while the Tramp mischievously tries to subvert the system. The company president, from his office (where he is doing a jigsaw puzzle), can see everything in the factory, including the bathroom, through a television system (in real life then still in an experimental stage), which he uses to issue commands to speed up the line. The dehumanization of the worker in the service of productivity reaches its climax when the Tramp is used as a guinea pig for a machine designed to feed workers while they continue to work. It malfunctions, forcing bolts into the Tramp’s mouth and assaulting him with food and a mechanical mouth wiper. Soon, the endless repetitive motion of the assembly line has the Tramp uncontrollably twitching and eventually going mad, a comedic representation of the “Forditis” workers suffered when Ford introduced the assembly line.
As the film proceeds, it broadens out to encompass the ills of the whole society—mass unemployment, inequality, hunger, labor unrest, and heartless government authorities. The Tramp returns for a second stint in the factory, this time as a mechanic’s helper, to find himself literally dragged into the bowels of the machinery. Chaplin is not oblivious to the rewards of Fordism; at one point the Tramp, out of a job again because of a strike, and his companion, the beautiful Gamin played by Paulette Goddard, fantasizes life in a well-furnished worker’s bungalow, with modern appliances and a cow that furnishes milk on demand. But in the end, there is no satisfactory place for the Tramp and the Gamin in Modern Times, in the world of the giant factory. The film concludes with the couple walking down a rural road toward sunset and an unknown future, with a touch of hope provided by the final title, “Buck up—never say die. We’ll get along.”
Chaplin’s film is a critique of Depression-era capitalism, but it is also a critique of the fundamental characteristics of the mass-production factory. For Chaplin, the only solution to the soul-deadening drudgery and monotony of the giant factory is literally to walk away. In this regard, Modern Times is different and far more radical than the work of other left-wing chroniclers of the giant factory, including Rivera, who saw it as advancing humanity, even if, as Louis Lozowick had written, it might only be in the future that “rationalization and economy” would be “allies of the working class in the building of socialism.” Left-wing labor leader Louis Goldblatt told Chaplin his film was “Luddite.” Machines, Goldblatt asserted, were necessary for improving living standards of the working class.
At least publicly, though, the left largely applauded Modern Times. Chaplin had become friendly with Boris Shumyatsky, the head of the film industry in the Soviet Union, during his visit to the United States, and Shumyatsky’s public praise for the film made it hard for those in the communist orbit to do otherwise. (A Daily Worker review did say that in Modern Times “machinery turns out to be a gadget for comic use, like a trick cigar.”) Much of the mainstream press hailed the film as a triumphant comeback for Chaplin, who had not made a movie for five years.
As Edward Newhouse noted in Partisan Review, few critics, even as they praised him, acknowledged Chaplin’s radical message. Modern Times became a favorite of the cineastes and leftists for decades. It was shown in cinemas in the Soviet Union and, after the Cuban Revolution, when mobile projection crews brought motion pictures to remote villages where they had never been seen, the first film they showed was Modern Times. But communist leaders, like capitalists, had no desire to walk away from factory modernity, the way the Tramp did in Chaplin’s masterpiece. To the contrary, at the very moment the film premiered, the Soviet Union was well into a crash industrialization program, building giant factories that used Ford methods, even as in the United States workers were finally finding a way to tame them. 64
Unionizing Mass Production
“Jesus Christ, it’s like the end of the world.” So mouthed a tirebuilder at the huge Firestone tire factory in Akron, at 2 a.m. on January 29, 1936, when the workers began one of the first major sit-down strikes in American history. It was a chilling moment, as Ruth McKenney reconstructed it in her bo
ok Industrial Valley, when a tirebuilder pulled a handle to shut down the production line:
With this signal, in perfect synchronization, with the rhythm they had learned in a great mass-production industry, the tirebuilders stepped back from their machines.
Instantly, the noise stopped. The whole room lay in perfect silence. . . . A moment ago there had been the weaving hands, the revolving wheels, the clanking belt, the moving hooks, the flashing tire tools. Now there was absolute stillness.
When the silence broke, the men began cheering. “We done it! We stopped the belt!” Then they sang “John Brown’s Body.” Out the windows they chorused “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.”65
It was like the end of the world, or at least the beginning of the end of the world of industrial autocracy that had been part and parcel of factory giantism. The great labor upheaval in the United States during the late 1930s and 1940s transformed the giant factory, the lives of industrial workers, their families and communities, and the nation itself. With unionization, an industrial system that had once brought so much misery now brought unprecedented working-class upward mobility, security, and well-being. The unionized giant factory helped create what many Americans look back at as a golden era of shared prosperity, when children did better than their parents and expected their children to do better than themselves.66
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