The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (39 page)
Read The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) Online
Authors: Steven Watts
The moral injunctions of Lee and the sociological department were codified for employees within a few months. In 1915, the company published
Helpful Hints and Advice to Employees,
a manual that carried a lengthy subtitle:
To Help Them Grasp the Opportunities Which Are Presented to Them by the Ford Profit-Sharing Plan.
This forty-one-page illustrated booklet explained the standards and procedures of the sociological department in great detail. It began with a clear statement of purpose:
The sole and simple aim of the entire scheme is to better the financial and moral standing of each employee and those of his household; to instill men with courage and a desire for health, happiness and prosperity. To give to father and mother sufficient for present
and future; to provide for families in sickness, in health and in old age and to take away fear and worry. To make a well rounded life and not a mere struggle for existence to men and their families, and to implant in the heart of every individual the wholesome desire to Help the Other Fellow, whenever he comes across your path, to the extent of your ability.
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This exhortation was followed by a long list of “hints and advice” for employees. The pamphlet devoted much attention to the issue of home sanitation and living arrangements, for example, instructing workers that they “should live in clean, well conducted homes and in rooms that are well lighted and ventilated.” Dark, dirty, foul-smelling tenements should be avoided, and employees, wherever their lodging, should take special care to deal appropriately with sewage and garbage to avoid disease. The pamphlet also urged an ethic of personal cleanliness by praising the healthy effects of frequent bathing and abundant soap and water. It insisted that employees not take in roomers or boarders, arguing that such moneymaking expedients endangered wholesome family life by bringing people of unknown morals and habits into the household.
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Helpful Hints and Advice
paid special attention to children. It urged workers to ensure their children's health and to provide them with clean, wholesome physical surroundings. Children required instruction in hygienic matters such as bathing daily and brushing teeth, and they needed to be taken to a doctor when illness or disease struck. Proper parents did not let their offspring run in the street but found safe spaces for play, directed youthful energies into useful channels, and sought to give them the best education possible. When their charges reached adolescence, parents should screen companions to make sure they were “decent and clean minded” and help children avoid vices damaging to their health or morals. Perhaps most important, the conscientious parent provided a moral model for the child: “THE EXAMPLE PARENTS SET THEIR CHILDREN GOES A LONG WAY IN FORMING THEIR HABITS. A GOOD EXAMPLE IS THE BEST SERMON.”
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The pamphlet dispensed abundant counsel on the wise use of money. Now that the pockets of Ford workers were filling with the bounty of the Five-Dollar Day, “thrift” became the order of the day: “Every employee participating in profit-sharing is expected to save some part of the profits allowed him. No hard and fast rules can be laid down or adopted in this particular, as responsibilities differ with different persons and families.” But the sociological department offered guidance about saving for retirement, banking with a reputable savings institution, securing a safe real-estate
mortgage to procure a house and property, and buying fire and life insurance. Interestingly, however, in light of Ford's central role in the consumer revolution of the early 1900s, the sociological department made this admonition: “Avoid, as much as possible, making purchases upon installment plan.” Nice furniture, musical instruments, and other household luxuries should wait for a cash purchase. Houses and automobiles, of course, were exempted from this restriction.
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To heighten the impact of the message, the pamphlet contained striking photographs. On the one hand, images of dirty, crowded bedrooms (“a breeder of tuberculosis”), children playing in cramped alleys filled with garbage, infected hands that resulted from medical neglect, toothless men who failed to practice oral hygiene, unsanitary kitchens and filthy bathrooms, and smoking shells of uninsured houses drove home warnings about cleanliness and prudent financial planning. The images were juxtaposed with cheerful photographs of neat, tidy homes, clean and airy bedrooms, school yards filled with joyful children, sanitary kitchens and bathrooms, and cozy dining rooms where families could gather for evening meals.
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The sociological department moved to put these principles and procedures into practice among its workers. Its key strike force lay in a battalion of investigators who carried the department's message to the homes and hearths of Ford workers. This group was chosen from various white-collar and supervisory sections of the company—medical department physicians, auditors, foremen, assistant superintendents—all of whom had established a reputation for reliability and solid character. By the end of January 1914, nearly a hundred investigators had been organized and deployed; by December, they numbered two hundred. However, within another six months, after preliminary investigations had been completed, the number leveled off to about fifty permanent investigators with supporting secretaries and staff.
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Fanning out into working-class neighborhoods of Detroit, Ford's sociological investigators performed a number of tasks. First, they identified flaws in a worker's home life. Investigators visited an employee's home in cases of persistent absenteeism, for example, to ascertain whether domestic difficulties such as illness, debt, or a strained marriage lay behind the problem. But mostly they arrived, forms and questionnaires in hand, to survey an employee's personal habits—whether he dependably brought home his salary, consumed alcohol and gambled, or physically mistreated his wife and children—and to inquire about household living arrangements, the care of children, and family spending and savings habits. One magazine recorded an encounter between an investigator and a worker's wife:
“Does Joe Polianski live here,” he asks.
“Yes, he lives here all right.”
“What sort of a man is Joe—pretty good fellow?”
“Sure, he's a fine man.”
“What does he do evenings?”
“Always home evenings. Goes to bed early.”
“Does he drink?”
“No! No! He does not drink.”
“What does he do with his money—does he save any?”
“Sure, he save. Some of it he send to old country to help old folks, some of it in bank.” “Well now, if Joe should get more wages what do you think he would do with it?” “Save it and buy a house, I guess.” “All right,” says the investigator, snapping his book together.
“Tell Joe to bring his bank book with him when he comes to work next week.”
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The investigators also observed firsthand the tidiness and hygiene of the home. If problems were apparent, they offered advice and guidance on cleanliness, money management, child care, alcohol abuse, and related matters. As a company manual explained, representatives of the sociological department were to advise employees on their living conditions and handling of money. The manual carefully added, however, “The work of the advisor is not to pry into family affairs from a meddlesome standpoint, but rather to …help those who are the kind that desire to seize opportunities, but, for various reasons are unskilled in being able to seize the best opportunities when they present themselves.”
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Ford investigators were also to make workers aware of the social services available through the company. For example, the company maintained a bank for employee use. First established in the fall of 1913, the Employees' Savings and Loan Association, administered by Lee and Frank L. Klingensmith, became a key repository for workers' funds, as well as a lending institution after the Five-Dollar Day announcement in January 1914. As Lee told the newspapers in April of that year, “The company encourages thrift by maintaining a savings bank for deposits and loans of a certain character. Thrift is one of the qualifications of the employee for profit-sharing, so the total deposits in the bank have more than trebled.”
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The sociological department informed employees of the important services provided by the Ford Legal Department. Its lawyers offered to employees, free of charge, advice on a variety of matters: the process of purchasing
a home, the relief of debt, the procurement of naturalization papers, the acquisition of life insurance. By 1917, the legal department maintained four attorneys and one real-estate specialist on its permanent staff. The medical department worked to treat employees' health problems, both as a humanitarian effort and to guarantee that employees “are in proper physical condition for their work.” Company physicians were on duty twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to handle injuries, illnesses, or emergencies concerning workers' families. Investigators from the sociological department urged workers to take advantage of this service. By 1920, the medical department had evolved into a twenty-room institution with a staff of ten doctors, two dentists, two pharmacists, an anesthetist, and nearly one hundred first-aid attendants.
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Thus, by late 1915, the sociological department was implementing the moral strictures that framed the Five-Dollar Day and seeking to shape the character, domestic life, and financial habits of Ford workers. Clearly, much of the impetus for the company's massive social project emanated from Henry Ford himself. With the Five-Dollar Day, his inclination to manufacture men as well as cars became an imperative.
Though Henry Ford had been at best an intermittent moralist in his early life, the reform impulse was in his blood. Determined not to succumb to the evils of big finance, this populist-leaning manufacturer had avoided banks and gone his own way in the forming of his company. He was disdainful of the prevailing notion that the automobile was a plaything for the rich, and staked his career on manufacturing a car for the people. By the mid-1910s, flush with the astounding success of the Model T and making more money than he knew what to do with, he determined to reform the state of the industrial worker. Ford turned, in equal measure, to the issues of wages and morality and simultaneously established the Five-Dollar Day and the sociological department. He had concluded that he could mass-produce virtue as well as vehicles.
Henry Ford worked closely with John R. Lee in setting the moral agenda of the sociological department. According to one observer, “I know that Mr. Ford and John Lee spent a good deal of time in handling this question [of qualifications] and setting ideas and rules that were to be followed.” Teaching the men responsible values so that their new abundance would go to their families rather than to saloonkeepers, prostitutes, or bookies, Ford believed, would ensure the benefits of the company's wage experiment. During their planning sessions, Lee once asked Ford how far he was willing
to go in terms of establishing rules for conduct among his workers. Ford's reply revealed his moral passion: “Well, John, if you ever get track of the devil, you run and catch up to him and you try to reform him.”
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In an appearance before the Congressional Commission on Industrial Relations on January 22,1915, a little over a year after the launching of the sociological department, Henry Ford provided an overview of this new agency. His description revealed its linkage of private and public virtue. He described investigators' efforts to counsel employees about healthy living and immoral, self-destructive practices. “The whole effort of this corps is to point men to life and make them discontented with a mere living,” he concluded. “The object was simply to better the financial and moral status of the men.”
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What prompted Ford to launch this unprecedented industrial experiment in moral as well as financial uplift? In many ways, his concept of the sociological department was a grab bag of early-twentieth-century reform impulses. Inspiration arrived from different directions. Not surprisingly, Ford's populist principles led him to see his company's social program as supporting the aspirations and opportunities of common workers. “We are planning to help the man who is weak and needs our help,” he once confided to an associate. “What [ordinary workers] need is the opportunity to do better, and some one to take a little personal interest in them—someone who will show that he has faith in them.”
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Also evident was an influence from the Social Gospel, an influential movement in turn-of-the-century Protestantism that sought to mold a secular version of salvation. In 1916, Ford put a clergyman in charge of the sociological department, and the industrialist's comments were littered with allusions to “tracking the devil” through sociological investigations and “bringing Jesus Christ into my factory.” Though no orthodox Christian, Ford once told an associate that “the Bible is the most valuable book in the world” and inquired about paying to have it rewritten in updated language, published, and distributed in a million copies to those who had never read it. Charles A. Brownell, an advertising specialist deeply involved with the company's social program, had many conversations with Ford about its intent. When asked by a reporter about Ford's motivation, he explained it as an exercise in “dispensing practical Christianity, interpreted through dollars and cents in the sharing of profits with employees.”
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