16.Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 250–60.
17.Gartman, “Origins of the Assembly Line,” 199, 201–02.
18.Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 249–53; Russell, “The Coming of the Line,” 38; Lindy Biggs, The Rational Factory: Architecture, Technology, and Work in America’s Age of Mass Production (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 27.
19.Joyce Shaw Peterson, American Automobile Workers, 1900–1933 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 43; Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 40–41; Biggs, The Rational Factory, 133–34; Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 534.
20.Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 10, 50; Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 53; Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Census of Manufactures, 1919 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1923), 355, 374–75; Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope, 27; Nelson, Managers and Workers, 9.
21.Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 288. A selection from the very large Ford collection of photographs documenting the Highland Park plant can be viewed online at https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/.
22.David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor; the Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 133–35, 238–40.
23.Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 77–78, 80–85, 89–93, 156; Russell, “The Coming of the Line,” 39–40.
24.In 1926, Ford reduced the workweek from six days to five, becoming one of the first major industrial companies to institute the forty-hour week. Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 95–168; Peterson, American Automobile Workers, 156; John Reed, “Why They Hate Ford,” The Masses, 8 (Oct. 1916), 11–12.
25.Nelson, Managers and Workers, 101–21; Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, 236–38; Reed, “Why They Hate Ford”; Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 114, 156–57.
26.Sward, Legend of Henry Ford, 107–09; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), lxxxvi– lxxxvii, 286, 302, 305.
27.Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 197–200; Sward, Legend of Henry Ford, 291–342. See also Harry Bennett, We Never Called Him Henry (Greenwich, CT: Gold Medal Books, 1951).
28.Biggs, The Rational Factory, 89–94. The Piquette Avenue plant is still standing. It now houses a museum and can be rented for corporate parties, weddings, and bar mitzvahs. See http://www.fordpiquetteavenueplant.org/ (accessed Sept. 8, 2015).
29.Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 225–26; “Industry’s Architect,” Time, June 29, 1942; Grant Hildebrand, Designing for Industry: The Architecture of Albert Kahn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974), 26–27. Some of Kahn’s early work can be seen in W. Hawkins Ferry, The Legacy of Albert Kahn (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1970).
30.George N. Pierce became the manufacturer of Pierce-Arrow automobiles. Nelson, Managers and Workers, 15–16; Betsy Hunter Bradley, The Works: The Industrial Architecture of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 155–58; Hildebrand, Designing for Industry, 28–43; Albert Kahn, “Industrial Architecture” (speech), May 25, 1939, Box 1, Albert Kahn Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Smith, Making the Modern, 59.
31.Biggs, The Rational Factory, 93–102, 110; Kahn, “Industrial Architecture.”
32.Smith, Making the Modern, 41–42, 71; Biggs, The Rational Factory, 78, 109, 120–25; Hildebrand, Designing for Industry, 52.
33.I thank Jeffrey Trask for making this point to me. See Gillian Darley, Factory (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), 157–89.
34.Biggs, The Rational Factory, 103–4, 150; Ford Factory Facts (Detroit, MI: Ford Motor Company, 1915) is an expanded and updated version of the 1912 booklet.
35.Both the Lingotto plant and the New York Packard service building are still standing. The former was converted into a cultural, hotel, office, retail, and educational complex by Renzo Piano; the latter now houses a car dealership. Jean Castex, Architecture of Italy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 47–49; Darley, Factory, 10–12; Christopher Gray, “The Car Is Still King on 11th Avenue,” New York Times, July 9, 2006.
36.Photographs of all of the mentioned buildings appear in Ferry, The Legacy of Albert Kahn, except for the Joy house, which is in Hildebrand, Designing for Industry, 74. On Kahn’s automobile projects and his firm organization, see Olsen and Cabadas, The American Auto Factory, 39, 65; George Nelson, Industrial Architecture of Albert Kahn, Inc. (New York: Architectural Book Publishing Company, 1939), 19–23; Smith, Making the Modern, 76–78, 85–87; and Hildebrand, Designing for Industry, 60, 124.
37.Olsen and Cabadas, The American Auto Factory, 39; Biggs, The Rational Factory, 138–40, 151. For Ford tractors, see Reynold Wik, Henry Ford and Grassroots America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 82–97.
38.Biggs, The Rational Factory, 146, 151; Writers’ Program of the Works Progress Administration, Michigan: A Guide to the Wolverine State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 221–24; Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009). Kingsford is now owned by The Clorox Company. The Clorox Company, “A Global Portfolio of Diverse Brands” (accessed Sept., 13, 2015), https://www.thecloroxcompany.com/products/our-brands/.
39.The Rouge foundry also made parts for Fordson tractors. Biggs, The Rational Factory, 148–49, 152; Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 268, 289.
40.Nelson, Industrial Architecture of Albert Kahn, Inc., 132; Biggs, The Rational Factory, 129, 141–57; Kahn, “Industrial Architecture”; Ferry, The Legacy of Albert Kahn, 113–16, 120–22, 129–301; The Reminiscences of Mr. B. R. Brown Jr., Benson Ford Research Center, Dearborn, Michigan; Works Progress Administration, Michigan, 220–21; Hildebrand, Designing for Industry, 91–92, 99, 102–08, 172–82. On Kahn’s and Ford’s antimodernism, see Albert Kahn, “Architectural Trend” (speech), April 15, 1931, Box 1, Albert Kahn Papers; Sward, Legend of Henry Ford, 259–75; and Smith, Making the Modern, 144–55 (though Smith’s interpretation is very different than mine).
41.In addition to Highland Park and River Rouge, Ford built major manufacturing plants in Canada and England that built finished cars and trucks and supplied parts to foreign branch plants. As employment at the Rouge grew, it shrank at Highland Park. In 1929, when the average number of hourly employees at the Rouge was 98,337, at Highland Park it was only 13,444. After the stock market crash, employment at the Rouge fell but remained substantial. Edmund Wilson, The American Earthquake (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), 219–20, 234, 687; Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 210, 365–66, 542–43; Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope, 207–08; Bruce Pietrykowski, “Fordism at Ford: Spatial Decentralization and Labor Segmentation at the Ford Motor Company, 1920–1950,” Economic Geography 71 (4) (Oct. 1995), 386, 389–91; Historic American Engineering Record, Mid-Atlantic Region National Park Service, “Dodge Bros. Motor Car Company Plant (Dodge Main): Photographs, Written Historical and Descriptive Data” (Philadelphia: Department of the Interior, 1980); Ronald Edsforth, Class Conflict and Cultural Consensus: The Making of a Mass Consumer Society in Flint, Michigan (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 77; New York Times, May 31, 1925, Apr. 9, 1972; Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 263–301; Biggs, The Rational Factory, 148; Sward, Legend of Henry Ford, 185–205; The Reminiscences of Mr. B. R. Brown Jr.
42.Not everyone, though, was enthralled. European carmaker André Citroen, after reporting that his visit to Dearborn left him “greatly impressed by the power of Ford’s production and his marvelous industrial creations at the River Rouge plant,” added “regrettably, the artistic element is absent. Nothing about Ford or his plant suggests a trace of the finer esthetic
qualities.” Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 260–61; Olsen and Cabadas, The American Auto Factory, 61, 63, 67, 70–71; New York Times, Apr. 22, 1923.
43.Kahn also helped design both the General Motors and Ford exhibitions at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. John E. Findling, ed., Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1851–1988 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 22; Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1–2; Grandin, Fordlandia, 2; Richard Guy Wilson, Dianne H. Pilgrim, and Dickran Tashjian, The Machine Age in America 1918–1941 (New York: The Brooklyn Museum and Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 27; Nelson, Industrial Architecture of Albert Kahn, Inc., 97; Hildebrand, Designing for Industry, 206, 213; Works Progress Administration, Michigan, 286, 292–93; New York Times, Apr. 9, 1972; U.S. Travel Service, U.S. Department of Commerce, USA Plant Visits 1977–1978 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, n.d.).
44.David Roediger, “Americanism and Fordism—American Style: Kate Richards O’Hare’s ‘Has Henry Ford Made Good?’,” Labor History 29 (2) (Spring 1988), 241–52.
45.John Reed, “Why They Hate Ford,” 11–12; Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 88.
46.Edmund Wilson, “The Despot of Dearborn,” Scribner’s Magazine, July 1931, 24–36; Roediger, “Americanism and Fordism—American Style,” 243; Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free Press, 1991), 259–70; Filene, The Way Out, 199, 201, 215–17, 221. On Ford’s anti-Semitism, see Sward, Legend of Henry Ford, 146–60.
47.John Dos Passos, The Big Money ([1936] New York: New American Library, 1969), 70–77, and Alfred Kazin’s introduction to this edition, xi–xii. Cecelia Tichi expanded on Kazin’s observation in Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 194–216.
48.Smith, Making the Modern, 16–18; Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night ([1932] New York: New Directions, 1938); Upton Sinclair, The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America (Emaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1937); Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: A Novel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932).
49.Darley, Factory, 15–27, 34; Wilson, Pilgrim, and Tashjian, The Machine Age in America, 23, 29; Kim Sichel, From Icon to Irony: German and American Industrial Photography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995); Leah Bendavid-Val, Propaganda and Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. (Zurich: Edition Stemmle, 1999).
50.Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1963), quotes on 18, 33, 40, 49; Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White, quote on 74. Bourke-White may have been inspired by O’Neill’s play, in which one character says “I love dynamos. O love to hear them sing.” Eugene O’Neill, Dynamo (New York: Horace Liveright, 1929), 92.
51.Wilson, Pilgrim, and Tashjian, The Machine Age in America, 69; Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White, 87–89; Life, Nov. 23, 1936; William H. Young and Nancy K. Young, The 1930s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 156. “Margaret Bourke-White Photographic Material, Itemized Listing” is a comprehensive list of her photographs at the Margaret Bourke-White Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries, including her factory photographs, https://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/b/bourke-white_m.htm#series7 (accessed Sept. 23, 2015). For Hine, see, for example, Jonathan L. Doherty, ed., Women at Work: 153 Photographs by Lewis W. Hine (New York: Dover Publications and George Eastman House, 1983).
52.Sheeler’s portfolio of Rouge photographs can be seen at the Detroit Institute of Art website for the 2004 exhibition “The Photography of Charles Sheeler, American Modernist” (accessed Sept. 23, 2015), http://www.dia.org/exhibitions/sheeler/content/rouge_gallery/hydra_shear.html. Sharon Lynn Corwin, “Selling ‘America’: Precisionism and the Rhetoric of Industry, 1916–1939,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2001, 17–79, 158; Carol Troyen, “Sheeler, Charles,” American National Biography Online Feb. 2000 (accessed Sept. 24 2015), http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-00795.html; Wilson, Pilgrim, and Tashjian, The Machine Age in America, 24, 78, 218–19; Smith, Making the Modern, 111–13. The Ford company returned to the strategy of selling cars through imagery of the magic and majesty of their production in a 1940 film it commissioned, Symphony in F, shown at the New York World’s Fair. It can be seen at “Symphony in F: An Industrial Fantasia for the World of Tomorrow,” The National Archives, Unwritten Record Blog, Mar. 3, 2016, https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2016/03/03/symphony-in-f-an-industrial-fantasia-for-the-world-of-tomorrow/.
53.Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 355–56; Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 282–83. For Sheeler’s photomontage “Industry,” see Wilson, Pilgrim, and Tashjian, The Machine Age in America, 24, 218. American Landscape is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art; Classic Landscape in the collection of the National Gallery of Art. See also River Rouge Plant, Whitney Museum of American Art, and City Interior, Worcester Art Museum. Amoskeag Mill Yard # 1 and Amoskeag Canal are in the collection of the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire. Amoskeag Mills #2 is in the collection of the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas. Hine’s Amoskeag photographs are owned by the Library of Congress and can be viewed at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=Amoskeag%20hine (accessed Nov. 4, 2016). Bourke-White’s Amoskeag photographs are in Oversize 5, folders 31–35, Margaret Bourke-White Papers.
54.Smith, Making the Modern, 194; Troyen, “Sheeler, Charles.”
55.Carol Quirke, Eyes on Labor: News Photography and America’s Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 273–74; Corwin, “Selling ‘America,’” 127; Life, Nov. 23, 1936; Nov. 14, 1938.
56.Sharon Lynn Corwin stresses, contrary to the standard account and to Terry Smith, that workers do appear in Sheeler’s Rouge photographs and are critical to their meaning. Corwin, “Selling ‘America,’” 23; Fortune, Dec. 1940.
57.Like Bourke-White, Driggs grew up familiar with the world of industry; her father was an engineer for a steel company. Rivera and many of the Precisionists shared a past engagement with Cubism. Corwin, “Selling ‘America,’” 145–48, 159–62, 165; Barbara Zabel, “Louis Lozowick and Technological Optimism of the 1920s,” Archives of American Art Journal 14 (2) (1974), 17–21; Wilson, Pilgrim, and Tashjian, The Machine Age in America, 237–42, 343; Linda Bank Downs, Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals (New York: Norton, 1999), 21.
58.Downs, Diego Rivera, 22, 28.
59.Henry Ford offered a chauffeured Lincoln to Rivera and Kahlo to use in their exploration of the city, but Rivera thought it would be embarrassing for artists to be seen in such luxury, so he accepted a more modest car from Edsel instead. Mark Rosenthal, “Diego and Frida”; Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera, “April 21, 1932”; Linda Downs, “The Director and the Artist: Two Revolutionaries”; and John Dean, “’He’s the Artist in the Family’: The Life, Times, and Character of Edsel Ford,” all in Rosenthal, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit (Detroit, MI: Detroit Institute of Arts, 2015). On the impact of the Depression on Detroit, see Steve Babson with Ron Alpern, Dave Elsila, and John Revitte, Working Detroit: The Making of a Union Town (New York: Adama Books, 1984), 52–60.
60.Rosenthal, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, 102–03, 219.
61.Rivera’s depiction of the machinery and processes at the Rouge, working from sketches, photographs, and information provided by Ford engineers, is remarkably accurate. The one major exception is the giant stamping machine in the south wall panel. Rivera painted an older model machine—the one Sheeler had photographed—rather than the one then in use. (Rivera may have worked from the Sheeler photo.) Apparently Rivera preferred the anthropomorphic qualities of the older machine. For a detailed description and analysis of the murals and their relationship to actual Rouge activity, see Downs, Diego Rivera.
62.Rosenthal, Diego Rivera and Frid
a Kahlo, 103–07, 182; Detroit News, Mar. 22, 1933, and May 12, 1933. Before returning to Mexico, Rivera completed a series of murals for the leftist New Workers School in New York City that included a portrayal of the Homestead strike. See David P. Demarest, Jr., ed., “The River Ran Red”: Homestead 1892 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 218. The Rouge appears in another Detroit mural, painted in 1937 by WPA artist Walter Speck for the headquarters of United Automobile Workers Local 174. It now is in the Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit. See “Collection Spotlight: UAW Local 174 Mural,” Oct. 20, 2016, https://reuther.wayne.edu/node/13600.
63.In another painting Kahlo began in Detroit, Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States, the Highland Park powerhouse appears in the background. Downs, Diego Rivera, 58–60; Rosenthal, “Diego and Frida: High Drama in Detroit,” and Solomon Grimberg, “The Lost Desire: Frida Kahlo in Detroit,” in Rosenthal, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
64.Charles Chaplin, Modern Times (United Artists, 1936); Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 319–20; Charles Musser, “Modern Times (Chaplin 1936),” (accessed Sept. 30, 2015), http://actionspeaksradio.org/chaplin-by-charles-musser-2012/); Joyce Milton, Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 336, 348, 350; Mark Lynn Anderson, “Modern Times” (accessed Sept. 30, 2015), http://laborfilms.org/modern-times/; Edward Newhouse, “Charlie’s Critics,” Partisan Review and Anvil, Apr. 1936, 25–26 (includes quote from Daily Worker review); Stephen Kotchin, Magic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 184; Octavio Cortazar, Por Primera Vez/For the First Times (El Instituto Cubano, Lombarda Industria Cinematografia, 1967). In an odd coda, after the completion of Modern Times, Paulette Goddard and Chaplin ended their romantic relationship and Goddard went on to have one with Rivera. In a mural Rivera painted in San Francisco in 1940, Unión de la Expresión Artistica del Norte y Sur de este Continente (The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on This Continent), he included images of Chaplin, Kahlo, and Goddard eyeing each other suspiciously and a mashup of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue and a Detroit Motor Company stamping machine, a rare return to a theme of Detroit Industry. David Robinson, Chaplin, His Life and Art (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), 509; City College of San Francisco, “Pan American Unity Mural,” (accessed Oct. 1, 2015), https://www.ccsf.edu/en/about-city-college/diego-rivera-mural/overview.html.
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