The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (30 page)

The spirit of Taylorism also could be seen in the general atmosphere of the Highland Park factory. Journalists O. J. Abell and Fred Colvin, who studied the pre–assembly-line facility for articles in
Iron Age
and
American Machinist,
described how “the pressure of rush” was omnipresent. Ford foremen drove workers to new heights of productivity. In Abell's words, a foreman must “see to it that the men under him turn out so many pieces per day and personally work to correct whatever may prevent it.” His quota came from a daily schedule setting out work to be completed by his department. William Klann gave a glimpse of this atmosphere. Highland Park employed many recent immigrants, he related, and “one word [
sic
] every foreman had to learn in English, German, Polish, and Italian was ‘hurry up.’ ”
⁴⁵

With the advent of the assembly line, Ford managers created the quintessential system for regulating and rationalizing the labor process. The basic procedure made management the absolute arbiters of when, at what speed, and in what fashion work was performed. It also provided the means for Ford engineers to reorganize labor completely, according to standards of efficiency. The assembly line's smooth, continuous flow, in the words of Horace Arnold, worked by “hurrying the slow men, holding the fast men back from pushing work to those in advance, and acting as an all-around adjuster and equalizer.” It was the apotheosis of scientific management.
⁴⁶

But this revolution in the conduct of labor also transformed its soul. For generations, American attitudes about work had been rooted in the Protestant
work ethic. From the Puritans through the periodic evangelical upsurges of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this tradition insisted that work must be morally meaningful and spiritually fulfilling as well as economically sustaining. Laboring hard to fulfill one's “calling” was a way to praise God, build character, and turn a profit simultaneously. Work exercised the moral as well as the physical faculties.
⁴⁷

The assembly line, by making labor monotonous and unfulfilling, eroded the foundations of the ethic. It raised troubling questions about the meaning of work in modern society, and Henry Ford, as well as anyone, confronted them. Although he later gained a reputation as a soulless exploiter of labor, he anguished over the work issue in his early career. He was a diehard defender of the traditional work ethic, but he viewed it as ill-suited to a new industrial age. He sought to redefine the modern meaning of labor by softening its physical demands and linking it to consumer abundance. Ford's struggle to construct a new moral foundation for labor reflected the uncertainty of his times.

Long after the advent of the assembly line, Henry Ford defended the old-fashioned view that work was morally, as well as financially, rewarding. The compulsion to labor, he believed, was rooted in human nature. “The natural thing to do is to work,” Ford proclaimed, “to recognize that prosperity and happiness can be obtained only through honest effort.” He agreed with a long line of Western political economists such as John Locke, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx, who held that labor is what added value to raw materials, and thus people were entitled to “the right of property” created by that labor. In the best tradition of the Protestant work ethic, he insisted on the moral discipline of labor. Work and play should not be mixed. “When we are at work we ought to be at work. When we are at play we ought to be at play,” he wrote. “When the work is done, then the play can come, but not before.”
⁴⁸

As Ford wrote in
My Life and Work,
“Work is our sanity, our self-respect, our salvation…. The man who does not get a certain satisfaction out of his day's work is losing the best part of his pay. For the day's work is a great thing—a very great thing! It is at the very foundation of the world; it is the basis of our self-respect.” In interviews, Ford stressed the same theme. “Work for the joy of working. Work regardless of profits,” he told a journalist. “[Most people] work hard, in order to be able to quit working. They need to work for the sake of the work; and it's hard to make them understand that.”
⁴⁹

At the same time, however, he recognized that modern mass production had changed the nature and meaning of labor. Ford supported Taylorized work not just for its efficiency. He pointed out that the assembly line had
lifted the burden of physical drudgery from the backs of workmen, a humane agenda that critics often overlooked. Employees did little lifting or trucking of materials at Highland Park, and, as Ford noted proudly, “We have succeeded to a very great extent in relieving men of the heavier and more onerous jobs that used to sap their strength.” Moreover, he argued that this reduction of physical demand actually supported the Protestant work ethic by eliminating waste. “A cardinal principle of mass production is that hard work, in the old physical sense of laborious burden-bearing, is wasteful,” he observed. “Save ten steps a day for each of twelve thousand employees and you will have saved fifty miles of wasted motion and misspent energy.”
⁵⁰

He also contended that the assembly line, far from violating people's desire for meaningful work, was a welcome reform for most workers, who did not wish to think when they worked. “The average worker, I am sorry to say, wants a job in which he does not have to put forth much physical exertion—above all, he wants a job in which he does not have to think,” he wrote. And for those not satisfied with repetitive work, the assembly line actually
increased
the opportunity for creative endeavor. “The need for skilled artisans and creative genius is greater under mass production than without it,” Ford declared. Highland Park demanded a host of machinists, pattern-makers, and tool-builders whose jobs required great skill. “Today we have skilled mechanics in plenty, [but] they do not produce automo-biles—they make it easy for others to produce them,” Ford explained. The assembly line simply recognized the differences in human makeup by separating those who treasured job skills from those who sought easier tasks. “We have to recognize the unevenness in human mental equipments,” Ford insisted. “If every job in our place required skill the place would never have existed.”
⁵¹

If Ford was unblinking in his appraisal of human frailty, he was equally so in his promotion of the discipline required by a Taylorized workplace. In a factory like Highland Park, where an extreme division of labor had created a web of interconnectedness, workers had to perform tasks as they were defined. “We expect the men to do what they are told,” Ford said bluntly. “The organization is so highly specialized and one part is so dependent upon another that we could not for a moment consider allowing men to have their own way.” For Ford, once again, this impulse was partly rooted in tradition. The discipline required by the assembly line, he believed, was little different from that required by the old-fashioned demands of the work ethic.
⁵²

Ford's advocacy of Taylorized work, however, did not render him insensitive to its dangers. On occasion, he lashed out at the “theorists and bookish
reformers“who romanticized the fulfillments of ”medieval toil.” And he insisted that company investigations revealed that assembly-line workers did not wish to switch tasks. “They do not like changes,” Ford concluded. “If [a worker] stays in production it is because he likes it.”
⁵³

In calmer moments, however, Ford confessed to being troubled, even anguished by the implications of routine, thoughtless assembly-line labor. “Repetitive labor—the doing of one thing over and over and always in the same way—is a terrifying prospect to a certain kind of mind. It is terrifying to me,” he admitted. “I could not possibly do the same thing day in and day out.” In a philosophical moment, he went even further. Though scientific management had removed much of the physical burden from modern industrial labor, he noted, it was now time to take reform forward:

Ultimately, however, Ford dismissed his doubts about Taylorized work by turning to a familiar source of comfort: consumer abundance. The best rationale for the new forms of mass-production labor, he concluded, lay in the rewards of consumption. Assembly-line work meant more productivity, which brought higher wages, which provided more money for workers to enjoy material goods. For Ford, this opportunity, more than anything else, compensated for the monotonous aspects of modern industrial labor. Taylorized methods, he believed fervently, had opened new doors for “the increasing supply of human needs and the development of new standards of living …the enlargement of leisure, the increase of human contacts, the extension of individual range.” Ford condensed this belief into a maxim: “The methods of mass production enable the worker to earn more and thus to have more.”
⁵⁵

In a larger sense, Ford grasped that mass consumption provided the very raison d'être for mass production. The powerful surge of consumer demand in the early twentieth century provided the impetus for new production
techniques like the assembly line. To anyone who would listen, Ford preached this message: “The necessary, precedent condition of mass production is a capacity, latent or developed, of mass consumption, the ability to absorb large production. The two go together, and in the latter may be traced the reasons for the former.” The desires of consumers underlaid the outpouring of modern industrial production. Workers' ability to participate in this consumption is what reconciled them to the monotony of the assembly line. In his view, it was a wise and fulfilling trade-off.
⁵⁶

In another way, however, Ford's understanding of the problems of Taylorized labor was self-interested to the point of brutality. He believed that workers could simply be molded to fit the requirements of mass-production labor. Charles Sorensen told a story of how, on a Monday after Easter, when many of the men were missing from the factory after too much celebrating over the holiday, several managers were upset that production schedules would fall behind. Ford walked up when they were complaining, listened, and said, “Well, that is an easy thing to fix.” Flabbergasted, Sorensen asked for his magical solution. Ford replied, “Well, go ahead and make some more men for these jobs.” This formula was vintage Ford—simple, effective, and slightly unsettling. If men would not, or could not, embrace the new system of labor, you “made” new ones who would do so. Henry Ford believed that workers could be mass-produced in the same way that he mass-produced cars.
⁵⁷

Ultimately, it was an ironic situation. With his simpleminded belief that men could be made like so many interchangeable parts, Ford exhibited an inhumane streak that undermined the work ethic to which he was devoted. Mass-produced workers, by definition, could never appreciate the old-fashioned moral dimension of labor that he valued so highly. So, at the very time he proclaimed the importance of work, he unintentionally degraded it in ways he never really understood. In trying to straddle the divide between two worlds of work in such an awkward fashion, Ford lost his balance, and thus did the only thing he could do. Having robbed labor of any joy, sense of accomplishment, and moral meaning, he made the
fruits
of labor, or consumption, the real standard of happiness and achievement in one's work life in modern America. The circle was completed. Producing the Model T, as well as purchasing it, helped realize Henry Ford's vision of a consumer paradise.

In the summer of 1914,
Collier's Magazine
published a long article entitled “Detroit the Dynamic,” which examined the explosive growth of this Great Lakes city. It described booming industrial activity, with new factories shooting up almost weekly, a bustling commercial scene with merchant ships cruising down the Detroit River into Lake Erie, an expanding transportation hub that sent large railroad lines snaking out to every section of the United States, a growing population that kept street construction lagging behind multiplying neighborhoods, and an ambitious civic leadership that oversaw the construction of banks, office buildings, museums, and libraries. Julian Street's article culminated with a description of his trip to Detroit's westernmost boundary, where he came face to face with the city's most celebrated feature. He spoke with Henry Ford.

The industrialist's rapidly rising reputation intrigued Street. Along with the Model T, Ford's name had spread throughout the United States— indeed, throughout the world. Yet, Street noted, “little had surfaced that gave me a clear idea of Mr. Ford's personality. I wanted to see him…. I wanted to know what kind of man he was to look at and to listen to.” After jousting with a battalion of protective secretaries in Ford's office, and delaying for a day while he toured the factory, Street finally ran his mysterious prey to ground. He walked away mightily impressed with Ford's physical and mental qualities.

Ford, wrote Street, was a lean, wiry man of good height with gray hair, rather sharp features, and a casual yet determined way about him. The eyes were impressive—keen, set wide apart with a net of wrinkles at the edges, and expressive in their reflection of shrewdness, kindliness, humor, and a distinct wistfulness. The mouth, determined, collaborated with the eyes to form a dry grin that punctuated many of his statements. Overall, Street observed, Ford radiated a presence of understated power. Exuding quiet
confidence, he leaned back in his chair, his legs crossed and resting atop a wooden wastebasket.