65.Ruth McKenney, Industrial Valley (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), 261–62.
66.For an overview of this era, see Joshua B. Freeman, American Empire, 1945–2000: The Rise of a Global Empire, the Democratic Revolution at Home (New York: Viking, 2012).
67.There is a large literature about labor upsurge of the 1930s, but the best single account remains Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker 1933–1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970).
68.In addition to Bernstein, Turbulent Years, see, Ronald W. Schatz, The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Daniel Nelson, American Rubber Workers and Organized Labor, 1900–1941 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); and Sidney Fine, The Automobile Under the Blue Eagle: Labor, Management, and the Automobile Manufacturing Code (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964).
69.Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 509–51; Henry Kraus, The Many and the Few: A Chronicle of the Dynamic Auto Workers ([1947] Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). See, also, Sidney A. Fine, Sit-down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969).
70.Joshua Freeman et al., Who Built America? 395; Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 551–54, 608–09, 613; Steve Jefferys, Management and Managed: Fifty Years of Crisis at Chrysler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 71–77; Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 17–33.
71.Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 54–60; Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 432–73.
72.Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 478–98; Zieger, CIO, 79, 82.
73.Zieger, CIO, 121–31.
74.No similar size election again would be held until 1999, when seventy-four thousand home-care workers in Los Angeles were sent ballots to determine if they wanted union representation. John Barnard, American Vanguard: The United Auto Workers during the Reuther Years, 1935–1970 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 153–64; Zieger, CIO, 122–24; Los Angeles Times, Feb. 26, 1999.
75.Joshua Freeman, “Delivering the Goods: Industrial Unionism During World War II,” Labor History 19 (4) (Fall 1978); U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789–1945 (Washington, D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949), 72. See also Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II ([1982] Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003).
Chapter 5
“COMMUNISM IS SOVIET POWER PLUS THE ELECTRIFICATION OF THE WHOLE COUNTRY”
1.Detroit Sunday News, Dec. 15, 1929. Photographs of the plant site and construction are in box 10, Albert Kahn Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. See also “Agenda for Meeting with Russian Visitors—Saturday, June 13, 1964,” Russian Scrapbooks, vol. II, box 13, Kahn Papers; Those Who Built Stalingrad, As Told by Themselves (New York: International Publishers, 1934), 29; Alan M. Ball, Imagining America: Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century Russia (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 124; New York Times, Mar. 29, 1930, May 18, 1930; Margaret Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931), 118–27.
2.V. I. Lenin, “Our Foreign and Domestic Position and Party Tasks,” Speech Delivered to the Moscow Gubernia Conference of the R.C.P.(B.), Nov. 21, 1920, Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1966), 419–20.
3.Edward Hallett Carr and R. W. Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926–1929, Vol. I–II (London: Macmillan, 1969), 844, 898–902; Alexander Erlich, The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924–1928 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 164–65; J. V. Stalin, “A Year of Great Change, On the Occasion of the Twelfth Anniversary of the October Revolution,” Pravda 259 (Nov. 7, 1929), https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1929/11/03.htm; Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 32 (quoted passage), 69–70, 363, 366.
4.Arens went on to become a leading industrial designer, working for some of the best-known American corporations. Barnaby Haran cites Arens’s comments in his article “Tractor Factory Facts: Margaret Bourke-White’s Eyes on Russia and the Romance of Industry in the Five-Year Plan,” Oxford Art Journal 38 (1) (2015), 82. The full text is in New Masses 3 (7) (Nov. 1927), 3. On Arens, see “Biographical History,” Egmont Arens Papers Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries, accessed Feb. 23, 2016, http://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/a/arens_e.htm#d2e97.
5.Of course, there always were some government-owned factories, particularly to produce armaments. As discussed in Chapter 4, at times these played an important role in the development of production techniques.
6.On the impact of scientific management and mass production in Europe, see Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970 (New York: Viking, 1989), 285–323; Judith A. Merkle, Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Management Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), esp. 105, 136–223; Charles S. Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s,” Journal of Contemporary History 5 (2) (1970), pp. 27–61; and Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
7.Lenin was particularly attracted to Gilbreth’s work (as other Russian communists would be) because, by simplifying motions for completing tasks, it claimed to increase productivity without increasing the exploitation of workers as speedup did. S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories 1917–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 7–12; Merkle, Management and Ideology, 105–06, 179; Daniel A. Wren and Arthur G. Bedeian, “The Taylorization of Lenin: Rhetoric or Reality?” International Journal of Social Economics 31 (3) (2004), 287–99 (quote from Lenin on 288); V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism; A Popular Outline ([1917] New York: International Publishers, 1939).
8.Lenin’s remarks about Taylor were soon translated into English, circulated in the United States, and frequently quoted in business circles. Wren and Bedeian, “Taylorization of Lenin,” 288–89; Merkle, Management and Ideology, 111–15 (quote on 113).
9.Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed; Trotsky: 1879–1921 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 499–502; Merkle, Management and Ideology, 118–19; Kendall E. Bailes, “Alexei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism, 1918–24,” Soviet Studies 29 (3) (July 1977), 374, 380–83.
10.Merkle, Management and Ideology, 114–20; Bailes, “Alexei Gastev”; Vladimir Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia: Industrialization and Social Change in a Planned Economy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 101–02; Wren and Bedeian, “Taylorization of Lenin,” 290–91; Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, 498–501.
11.An earlier All-Russian Conference on Scientific Management had been organized by Trotsky in 1921, but failed to resolve the differences between the two sides of the debate. Bailes, “Alexei Gastev,” 387–93; Kendall E. Bailes, “The American Connection: Ideology and the Transfer of American Technology to the Soviet Union, 1917–1941,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (3) (July 1981), 437; Wren and Bedeian, “Taylorization of Lenin,” 291.
12.When a delegation from the Ford Motor Company visited Gastev’s institute in 1926, they deemed it “a circus, a comedy, a crazy house,” “a pitiful waste of young people’s time.” Merkle, Management and Ideology, 123; Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 93–94; Bailes, “Alexei Gastev,” 391, 393; Timothy W. Luke, Ideology and Soviet Industrialization (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 165–66; Wren and Bedeian, “Taylorization of Lenin” 291–96; Ball, Imagining America, 28–29.
13.My discussion of RAIC is based on Steve Fraser, “The ‘New Unionism’ and the ‘New Economic Policy’,” in James E. Cronin and Carmen Sirianni, eds., Work, Community and Power: The Experience of Labor in Europe and America, 1900–1925 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983).
14.William Z. Foster, Russian Workers and Workshops in 1926 (Chicago: Trade Union Educational League, 1926), 52; Erlich, Soviet Industrialization Debate, 24–25, 105–06, 114.
15.Erlich, Soviet Industrialization Debate, xvii–xviii, 140, 147, 161; Smith, Red Petrograd, 7–8, 10–12; Orlando Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 1891–1991: A History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 112.
16.Bailes, “The American Connection,” 430–31; Hans Rogger, “Amerikanizm and the Economic Development of Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (3) (July 1981); Hughes, American Genesis, 269; Dana G. Dalrymple, “The American Tractor Comes to Soviet Agriculture: The Transfer of a Technology,” Technology and Culture 5 (2) (Spring 1964), 192–94, 198; Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915–1933 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons: 1957), 255, 673–77.
17.Foster also claimed that Soviet workers accepted piecework and Taylorism because “The benefits of increased production flow to the workers, not to greedy capitalists.” William Z. Foster, Russian Workers, 13, 54; New York Times, Feb. 17, 1928 (“Fordizatsia”).
18.In seeing socialism as the outcome of a combination of Soviet rule with American methods, Trotsky was not only echoing Lenin but also voicing a common Bolshevik belief. In 1923, for example, Nikolai Bukharin declared “We need Marxism plus Americanism.” Rogger, “Amerikanizm,” 384. The Trotsky quotes come from his essay “Culture and Socialism,” Krasnaya Nov, 6 (Feb. 3, 1926), translated by Brian Pearce, in Leon Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life and Other Writings on Culture and Science (New York: Monad Press, 1973).
19.The Five-Year Plan was a highly detailed document, running more than 1,700 pages long. Erlich, Soviet Industrialization Debate; Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 894, 896; Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 4, 139, 146–48.
20.There perhaps was a cultural element in the Soviet embrace of industrial giantism as well; Russia, before and after the revolution, had a general predilection to monumentality, evident, for example, in buildings from the Hermitage to the never completed Moscow Palace of Soviets. My thanks to Kate Brown for this point. Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 844, 898–902; Erlich, Soviet Industrialization Debate, 67–68, 107–08, 140; Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 27; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 33–38.
21.Bailes, “The American Connection,” 431; Merkle, Management and Ideology, 125; Rogger, “Amerikanizm,” 416–17.
22.Another American, Bill Shatov, supervised a second, large early Soviet project, the Turksib railway, but that was a very different story; Shatov was a Russian-born anarchist, active in the United States in the Industrial Workers of the World, who returned to Russia in 1917. Hughes, American Genesis, 264–69; Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 900–901; Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia, 76–88; Sonia Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns’: How an American Architect and a Soviet Negotiator Jump-Started the Industrialization of Russia: Part II: Saul Bron,” Industrial Archeology 37 (1/2) (2011), 8–9. Melnikova-Raich’s article is the second part of her revelatory examination of the role of American companies and experts in Soviet industrialization based on extensive research in both U.S. and Soviet archives. On Shatov, see the Emma Goldman Papers, Editors’ Notes (accessed Jan. 11, 2016), http://editorsnotes.org/projects/emma/topics/286/.
23.Adler, “Russia ‘Arming’ with Tractor”; Maurice Hindus, “Preface,” in Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia, 14–15; Dalrymple, “The American Tractor Comes to Soviet Agriculture,” 210; Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 3.
24.The Soviets planned to produce a tractor based on an International Harvester model, receiving cooperation from the company without paying it royalties. New York Times, Nov. 5, 1928, May 5, 1929, and May 7, 1929; Sonia Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns’: How an American Architect and a Soviet Negotiator Jump-Started the Industrialization of Russia: Part I: Albert Kahn,” Industrial Archeology 36 (2) (2010), 60–61, 66; Economic Review of the Soviet Union, Apr. 1, 1930.
25.Detroit Free Press, May 14, 1929, and June 1, 1929.
26.Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 61, 66–68; New York Times, July 1, 1929, Mar. 29, 1930, May 18, 1930, and Mar. 27, 1932; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 38–45, 50–56 (Ivanov quote on 52), 206; Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 84–85; Rogger, “Amerikanizm,” 383–84.
27.New York Times, June 19, 1930; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 13, 62.
28.Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part II,” 9–11, 23–24; New York Times, May 5, 1929, May 7, 1929, June 1, 1929; Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 677–78, 683; Richard Cartwright Austin, Building Utopia: Erecting Russia’s First Modern City, 1930 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004), 12.
29.Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part II,” 11–12; Michigan Manufacturer and Financial Record, Apr. 19, 1930; Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 40; Betsy Hunter Bradley, The Works: The Industrial Architecture of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 22; Austin, Building Utopia, 5–6, 13–19.
30.Austin, Building Utopia, 31–43, 59–101, 121–39; New York Times, Dec. 2, 1931.
31.In April 1930, the Soviet Automobile Construction Trust decided it had been a mistake to ask Austin to design the autoworkers’ city: “If Americans are specialists in automobile construction, they are certainly far from specialists in designing Socialist town [sic] for the Soviet Republics.” Nonetheless, even in the radical socialist vision for the city there was some American influence. One of the key figures involved, architect and educator Alexander Zelenko, had spent time in the United States, including visits to Hull House in Chicago and the University Settlement in New York, where he was influenced by the ideas of John Dewey. New York Times, Dec. 16, 1929, Apr. 11, 1931, Mar. 27, 1932; Yordanka Valkanova, “The Passion for Educating the ‘New Man’: Debates about Preschooling in Soviet Russia, 1917–1925,” History of Education Quarterly 49 (2) (May 2009), 218; Austin, Building Utopia, 45–53, 84–85, 161–68; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 366.
32.The very popular Soviet novel Cement, by Fyodo Vasilievich Gladkov ([1925] New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1973), vividly portrays the huge obstacles and heroic efforts involved in Soviet industrialization. For first-person accounts in English of work on First-Year Plan projects, see Those Who Built Stalingrad and John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1942).
33.On-site reports include The Detroit Sunday News, Dec. 15, 1929, and New York Times, Nov. 21, 1930. Time coverage includes “Great Kahn,” May 20, 1929, “Austin’s Austingrad,” Sept. 16, 1929, and “Architects to Russia,” Jan. 20, 1930.
34.Saul G. Bron, Soviet Economic Development and American Business (New York: Horace Liveright, 1930), 76, 144–46.
35.Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 60–63; New York Times, Jan. 11, 1930; “Architects to Russia,” Time, Jan. 20, 1930; Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85; Detroit Free Press, Jan. 18, 1930; Detroit Times, Mar. 17, 1930.
36.“Industry’s Architect,” Time, June 29, 1942; Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 62–66, 75.
37.The design of the tractor to be produced in Chelyabinsk and much of the engineering for its manufacture was done at a Detroit office that had twelve U.S. and forty Soviet engineers. Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 69–71.
39.New York Times, Nov. 7, 1930, Nov. 24, 1930, Dec. 27, 1930, Sept. 28, 1931, Oct. 4, 1931, Apr. 14, 1934; Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 522; Meredith Roman, “Racism in a ‘Raceless’ Society: The Soviet Press and Representations of American Racial Violence at Stalingrad in 1930,” International Labor and Working-Class History 71 (Spring 2007), 187; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 64–66, 161, 164, 228–29, 261, 263.
40.New York Times, July 20, 1930; Austin, Building Utopia, 190–91; Victor Reuther, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 93, 101.
41.New York Times, July 20, 1930; May 11, 1931; May 14, 1931; May 18, 1931; Dec. 2, 1931 (Duranty), May 18, 1932; Austin, Building Utopia, 190–91, 197; Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 35; Reuther, Brothers Reuther, 88, 93, 101, 110.
42.Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 69; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 158; New York Times, Dec. 2, 1931.
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