The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (38 page)

At the national level, leftists vied with one another in their praise. Noted progressive lawyer Samuel Untermyer, who had established his reformist credentials in 1912 with a relentless interrogation of J. Pierpont Morgan as chief counsel for a congressional committee investigating the “money trust,” painted Ford in glowing colors. “Henry Ford has a prophetic eye. He is the first to see the inevitable readjustment of the relations between capital and labor looming on the horizon,” Untermyer told reporters. “He has established a glorious precedent.” Clarence Darrow, the attorney becoming known for his work on behalf of progressive causes, concurred.
“He has established a magnificent precedent,” he said of Ford's wage plan. “I honestly believe that what he has done is what all American employers of labor must eventually come to. Labor will demand its own. Ford has recognized the right of labor to make this demand.”
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Many prominent socialists also praised the Ford plan. Eugene V. Debs declared that, though socialists had been insisting for years that workers would respond to generous wages, a humane working environment, and social justice, it took Ford's Five-Dollar Day “to prove these theories on a large scale.” Kate Richards o'Hare, the socialist agitator from Kansas, journeyed to Detroit to interview Ford. Writing for the socialist journal the
National Rip-Saw,
she described Ford as “so absolutely 'just folks' that I felt quite as much at home with him as I would sitting on a cotton pile discussing the boll-weevil with a Texas farmer.” After several hours of discussion, o'Hare became convinced of his genuine idealism and belief in democracy and cooperation. Moreover, she castigated her fellow socialists for not providing
more
support for “having our theories worked out and demonstrated, as Ford has done.” Too many socialists, she accused, “in order to be perfectly orthodox, ignore Ford and read another chapter in Marx.”
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For at least a half-decade after the inauguration of the Five-Dollar Day, American socialists continued backing Henry Ford. Upton Sinclair, who in a later period would attack Ford as a heartless capitalist in his book
The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America
(1937), held a much more favorable view of him in the late 1910s. After speaking with Ford at length in 1919, when he came to southern California, Sinclair published the interview in
Reconstruction: A Herald of the New Time,
a journal edited by another socialist admirer of Ford, Allan L. Benson. At the outset, Sinclair described Ford as “a human and lovable person, with no reserves and no poses of any sort.” The writer maintained a kind of ironic distance throughout, continually probing Ford as to whether his money made him genuinely happy. At the same time, however, Sinclair asked questions allowing Ford to define himself as a transportation innovator, a friend of the workingman, the enemy of idle stockholders, a hater of corrupt politics, and a reformer who was determined “to put these steel-trust fellows out of business.” The Ford who emerged from the Sinclair interview was a reformer's dream. He valued his profits because these allowed him to make “better and cheaper cars” for ordinary people, and defined his happiness in terms of performing “public service.”
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John R. Commons, the progressive economist from the University of Wisconsin, certified Ford's reformist credentials in an article entitled “Henry Ford, Miracle Maker.” Part of a series in the magazine
The Independent
on businesses that were finding solutions to labor problems, this piece praised Ford as a “plunger in social psychology” who “believes in ordinary, plain people as they come along.” With his Five-Dollar Day, reluctance to fire workers, and attempts to find suitable jobs for his employees, the automaker demonstrated a “faith in human nature” and concern for his workers that were quite uncommon among industrial manufacturers. Through such policies, Commons concluded, Ford had created at Highland Park a harmonious system between capital and labor where “real team work is possible.”
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Ida Tarbell, the legendary muckraking journalist, spent ten days in Detroit in the spring of 1915 investigating Henry Ford's manufacturing operation. Charmed by Ford's good-heartedness and lack of pretense, and swayed by her observations at the factory, Tarbell became convinced that Ford had opened a door to happiness for laborers. His philosophy of inexpensive cars and high wages, she believed, was providing to industrial workers “a chance for what we are pleased to call these days a good life. And if they are going to have a good life they must not only have money but have low prices.”
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Some leftists, however, recognized that Ford's new wage policy would undermine the long-term radical agenda. The Five-Dollar Day, if successful, would strengthen, rather than weaken, the capitalist system. Jo Labadie warned of this danger. “Henry Ford's scheme is all right, but of course it doesn't dispose of the fundamental problem,” he told journalists. “I haven't a doubt that Ford will find his profit-sharing plan good business. His men will work the harder.” Journalist Gerald Stanley Lee, writing in
Harper's Weekly,
also pinpointed the danger of such wage reforms for leftist prospects. If powerful businessmen like Ford started thinking strategically, rather than instinctively defending their profits to the last penny, and then tried to improve the lives of their workers, he argued, radicalism would likely disappear. In his words, such actions would create “a new world, a world in which we will see Socialists and Syndicalists losing their jobs.”
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Most radicals reacted like John Reed, however. After visiting Highland Park in 1916 and discussing an array of issues with Ford, he remained skeptical about certain aspects of the new wage system. In many ways, he noted, “Ford profit-sharing is still in the form of a gift.” Handed out in generosity by a wealthy businessman, this policy was, in Reed's words, a species of “benevolent despotism” and “paternalism” rather than an attack on the structural inequalities of industrial capitalism. Ultimately, however, he decided that the strengths of Ford's wage reform outweighed its weaknesses. The automaker “knew the misery and waste of working-class lives,” Reed observed, and the $5.00 wage was a sincere attempt to ameliorate such living
conditions. As a test, Reed compared the results of two surveys of Ford workers, one done in late 1913and one done five months after the inauguration of the Five-Dollar Day. The contrast was dramatic. “The increase in life insurance was 86per cent. The value of homes owned increased 87per cent. The value of homes bought on contract increased 95per cent,” Reed observed. “Employees with ‘bad’ home conditions decreased from 23percent to 11/2 per cent while men living in bad neighborhoods decreased from 19 per cent to 21/2 per cent.” For Reed, the conclusion was obvious. He had to support a man who “felt that adequate incomes, freedom from anxiety about unemployment, and leisure, automatically made better workmen and better citizens.”
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But even as the praise of leftists converged with that of other groups around the country, the situation turned cloudy. In the months after the dramatic announcement, a disquieting fact slowly began to emerge. Rather than being granted automatically, as many observers assumed, the Five-Dollar Day was extended by management in concert with a system of regulations that sought to shape how the company's employees lived as well as worked. Moreover, it soon became clear that this wage policy was only part of Henry Ford's larger social vision, one that saw people being molded into certain shapes so they could flourish in modern American life. A specter of paternalism hovered in the background of Ford's scheme for improving the lots of workers, and it cast a shadow over the reform. For many observers, misgivings replaced unstinting praise.

In their press conference announcing the Five-Dollar Day, Henry Ford and James Couzens adopted the rhetoric of social justice and industrial cooperation. Accordingly, reporters stressed those same themes when they left Highland Park to file their stories. As the Detroit
Free Press
explained in its front-page story, “Because Henry Ford believes that the distribution of wealth between capital and labor is too uneven, the world's greatest profit sharing plan … was announced Monday morning by the company.”

Careful readers, however, may have noted an additional item mentioned casually in the coverage of the Five-Dollar Day. “Ford employees are to be further benefited by the establishment of a sociological department in the plant,” the
Free Press
article noted deep in the story. “Its work will be to guard against an employee's prosperity injuring his efficiency. Employees who cannot remain sober and industrious will be dismissed, but not until an indisposition to become a valuable employee is shown.”
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As more details came to light in 1914 and 1915, it gradually became evident that Ford's “sociological department” was more crucial to his wage reform than it first appeared. His new wage did not come to workers free and clear but was loaded with institutional and ideological baggage. In fact, it lay entangled in a web of requirements. Ford laborers who desired this new pay rate had to do more than work hard, effectively, and faithfully. They also had to meet certain moral standards and fulfill certain social obligations in the realm of family life and personal behavior. Nor were workers merely instructed to act in certain ways. Henry Ford created the sociological department to make sure they did so.

Moreover, as time unfolded it became clear that the Five-Dollar Day represented something much larger. This wage reform was but one dimension, albeit a highly publicized one, of a grand social project drawn up by Henry Ford and implemented by his company. The broader crusade was
partly nationalistic in its determination to make good Americans out of the polyglot immigrants who worked in his automobile factory. Yet, ultimately, it transcended national boundaries. Ford's broader social agenda sought to shape human beings who could function efficiently in the new society of mass production and mass consumption that the Model T had helped create. As he frequently noted, to both associates and reporters, he wanted to make men as well as automobiles.

As with so many things touched by Henry Ford, however, a profound irony came to color this grand project of industrial reformism. The Five-Dollar Day and its sociological apparatus was at once a modern attempt to give working people their due and a blueprint for moral discipline rooted in old-fashioned Victorian values from the world of Ford's youth. Like the Model T, Ford's reform aimed to enhance the lives of ordinary citizens in an advanced industrial society. At the same time, however, it promoted a back-ward-looking moral mandate that demanded allegiance to nineteenth-century values of self-control and domesticity. This prescription for creating new people to inhabit a new world by dint of an old-fashioned Victorian creed was replete with tension. Eventually, the contradictions would prove fatal.

The Five-Dollar Day went into effect on January 12, and its eligibility rules addressed matters of age, gender, and support of dependents. All married men were eligible for the new wage, as were males under age twenty-two who were supporting widowed mothers or brothers and sisters. All women who were supporting families would receive the pay boost. But unmarried females and those men not supporting dependents were excluded from Ford profit-sharing. Perhaps the most striking qualification, however, concerned matters of a personal nature: character, morals, habits and behavior, and family arrangements.
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From the outset, the new Ford plan made clear that higher wages were linked to a proper private life. In the January 5 press conference, James Couzens noted, “Thrift and good service and sobriety all will be encouraged and recognized.” In an interview with
Motor World
a few days later, he noted that employees “who cannot remain sober and industrious will be dismissed, but no one will be let out without being given every possible chance to make good.” Over the next several months, such virtues and several others were elevated to the status of qualifications as an elaborate set of moral standards was put in place. To be eligible for the $5.00rate, the employee needed to demonstrate that he did not drink alcohol or physically mistreat
his family or have boarders in his home, and that he regularly deposited money in a savings account, maintained a clean home, and had a good moral character.
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John R. Lee, the first head of the sociological department, took the lead in defining its moral mission. He impressed all who knew him as a talented, honest, benevolent man well suited to the company's new social initiative. An associate described Lee as “the soul of the organization, the champion of the underdog…. He has a keen sense of justice and a sympathy with men in trouble that leads to an understanding of their problems.”
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Lee often told people that the Ford Company's social work had begun in 1912, when a dependable employee operating a drop hammer began to fall off on the job. A brief talk with the man revealed that the problem lay in his domestic life. “Sickness, indebtedness, and fear and worry over things that related entirely to the home, had crept in and put a satisfactory human unit entirely out of harmony with the things that were necessary for production,” Lee related. Such incidents prompted the company to turn its attention to reforming the private life as well as raising the wages of its employees. In particular, according to Lee, the sociological dimension of the Five-Dollar Day plan stemmed from two sources. First, preliminary investigations indicated that men who came from settled, thrifty, harmonious homes were happier and performed better as workers. Second, the greatly increased wages of early 1914 raised among Ford management a fear that the princely sum of $5.00 per day might trigger irresponsible behavior among its recipients. In Lee's words, such sudden prosperity “would work a tremendous handicap along the paths of rectitude and right living and would make of them a menace to society.” In other words, for their own good workers needed to be instructed on how to manage their abundance responsibly. Thus the sociological department, Lee argued, tried to provide “something that is of great benefit both to the men and to the company.”
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