The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (40 page)

Ford's sociological program further drew upon the heritage of nine-teenth-century Victorianism, the moral tradition in which he had been raised. Since the 1830s, bourgeois life in the United States had been dominated by genteel values of self-restraint, middle-class domesticity, and a strong ethic of character formation. Ford's embrace of these values colored
the agenda of the sociological department. The company's social programs, he told interviewers, would have “a striking effect in the development of personal character” and help the typical worker become morally self-reliant, family-oriented, and socially responsible. The worker who was living in a salacious or improvident manner, Ford explained, would be assisted

But Ford also saw the sociological department as an important instrument for inculcating new values of consumer abundance. In his view, investigators needed to teach workers how to consume responsibly. Immigrant workers, he believed, especially required instruction in living more abundantly without falling into profligacy. “We have seventy-five supervisors who are under orders to go out to teach our people to live better and to want more,” he declared. Teaching the wise use of wages was especially important. “We know there are some out there who can't stand prosperity,” Ford told
Everybody's Magazine.
“It is our business to see that they spend their money right.”
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Ultimately, Ford's vision of the sociological department reflected the social-engineering ethos of progressive reformers in the early twentieth century. Seeking to avoid both working-class revolt and business autocracy, progressives favored the rational, efficient management of human affairs to overcome problems of poverty, waste, and social inequality and create responsible citizens. In his interviews and writing, Ford stressed that his company's social programs followed precisely this route. Also, in typical progressive fashion, he argued that environmental factors lay at the root of social problems. Company investigators could identify and rectify them, and thus create fuller and happier lives among workers and their families. The sociological department could help workers become good citizens. As Ford noted of his social-engineering sensibility:

As the sociological department gathered these reform impulses and began its work of molding the private lives of company workers, Henry Ford turned to a friend to direct its operation. A leading minister in the Detroit area, he enthusiastically embraced the challenge posed by the company's social work. In 1915, he became the architect of the Ford Motor Company's moral mission.

The Reverend Samuel S. Marquis was exhausted. Over the previous few years, as dean of the newly constructed St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral in Detroit, he had worked relentlessly, raising funds, energizing the congregation, and preaching. By early 1915, he had drained his body of energy, and his health had begun to decline. His physician grew worried and suggested a year's vacation, but Marquis rejected the idea. “A change in work would be more beneficial to me than being idle,” he replied. A parishioner with whom he had become friendly, Henry Ford, came forward with a proposal. Ford encouraged Marquis to contact his company's new sociological department and offer his services. The minister found the idea attractive and arranged to become a volunteer. Ford was elated; using his nickname for Marquis, he provided a directive: “I want you, Mark, to put Jesus Christ into my factory.”
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Henry Ford respected the kind of social reformism that the Reverend Marquis represented. For several years, this prominent preacher had spoken vigorously throughout Detroit on behalf of reconciliation between capital and labor. He had proselytized for a rigorous personal code, stressing moral improvement. He had articulated a view of human nature based on a mechanical model. To Ford, all of these qualities made Marquis the perfect choice for the job he would assume at the company within a matter of months—head of the sociological department and spokesman for its program of social reform.

Samuel Simpson Marquis had been born in Sharon, Ohio, in 1866, the offspring of several generations of Episcopalian ministers. He pursued his own ecclesiastical studies, first at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, and then at Cambridge Theological School in Massachusetts, where he earned a bachelor-of-divinity degree in 1893. Marquis served as rector at two Massachusetts churches for several years before assuming that same position at
Detroit's St. Joseph Church in 1901. On May 15, 1906, he became dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, where he gained public notice for advocating the principles of the Social Gospel movement.
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In the decade after his arrival in Detroit, Marquis steadily emerged as an energetic, outspoken, and progressive public figure who spoke out not only on spiritual matters but on social issues of the day. In 1904, he appeared on the front page of the Detroit
Free Press
advocating the establishment of a local civic federation where leaders of capital and labor could gather to work for “industrial peace.” “The welfare of both depends upon their getting together upon a basis of intelligence, good will, equal rights, and equal power,” he insisted. He also advocated equal rights for men and women. Addressing the matter of divorce, he denounced a double standard in matters of morality. “I do not see why woman should not exact the same standard of morality of man as he would exact from her. Morals will not improve until man and woman are on equal standard,” he stated.
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Marquis enhanced his reformist credentials with a personal image as a charismatic, masculine figure. He rejected the model of the pale, pious dogooder and embraced that of Theodore Roosevelt—the energetic, happy warrior battling against sin. “His activities are perpetual, save as he sleeps. He is in deadly earnest,” wrote one newspaper. “He hits from the shoulder.” Marquis had an infectious laugh—“no clerical contagion of gloom for him”—and told a rollicking story. No pasty-faced bookworm or ascetic, the minister cultivated “the healthy primitive instincts.” He often retreated from the city to a small cabin, built by his own hands, in a remote area where he rejuvenated himself through hard work and direct contact with nature. “He comes back as the trained and militant sky pilot should be, equal to and eager for the work to which his life is dedicated,” concluded the Detroit
Journal.
“There is not the mark of a weakling about him.”
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So, by 1915, when Marquis made his first sojourn to the Ford Motor Company, he had an established reputation as a vigorous proponent of social as well as spiritual reform. Near the end of the year, when John R. Lee resigned to pursue other business opportunities, Henry Ford asked Marquis to become head of the sociological department. Within a short time, the minister mustered his considerable energy and eloquence and went forth to explain to the world the company's experiment in social reform.
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On February 23, 1916, Marquis appeared before the National Education Association to give a major address on Ford's sociological department. He began in striking fashion. “The impression has somehow got abroad that Henry Ford is in the automobile business,” he declared. “It isn't true…. [Cars] are but the by-products of his real business, which is the making of men.” The Ford factory at Highland Park, he argued, was as
much a school as a production center, and it fully aimed to improve the lives of its workers as well as to manufacture sturdy, reliable cars for the American people. With this goal in mind, Henry Ford had inaugurated the Five-Dollar Day along with “a plan for the education of the working-men in thrift, honesty, sobriety, better housing, and better living generally.” Marquis listed its concrete objectives:

1. To improve a man's tastes and at the same time increase his earning power.
   

2. To teach a man to use his income in a constructive manner.
   

3. To put a man into a right relation with his family.
   

4. To put a man into right relations with his community.
   

5. To put a man right with his work and his employer.
   

6. To fit the foreigner to become a citizen and to encourage him to do so.
   

7. To give the man who is down and out a chance to come back.
   

This reform effort, Marquis explained, aimed to create better citizens and happier human beings. “The Ford idea,” he explained, “is to increase a man's capacity for happiness and at the same time to increase his efficiency, his earning capacity, his worth to society, so that he may have access to the things he has been taught to enjoy.”
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Over the next several years, Marquis stalwartly defended the principles of the sociological department. Its system, he stated, taught workers the value of hard work and self-reliance. Rather than handing out charity, the company sought to pay its men high wages and then assist them in learning how to spend their money wisely. Rather than making workers wards of the company and encouraging dependence upon outside support, it insisted that each individual “be put ultimately upon a self-supporting basis.”
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For critics who accused the Ford Motor Company of interfering in the private affairs of its employees, Marquis had a rejoinder. Some employees did object to investigators' asking questions, but nearly always they were individuals who wanted to protect “such liberties as getting drunk and beating up one's wife, abusing one's family, and wasting one's money.” To those who questioned the efficacy of the sociological department's program, he offered a long list of endorsements from Detroit judges and law-enforcement officials who praised the company for enhancing the wellbeing of both its workers and the broader community.
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Marquis also stressed that the Ford program helped industrial workers cope with the new consumer culture springing up around them. He said that newly affluent employees “do not know how to take care of their money
or employ their leisure,” and explained that Ford sociologists ”not only teach a man how to earn more money, but … how to spend it.” The company, in Marquis' words, sought to provide a wage “that provides for some of the luxuries of life, as well as for its necessities.” The sociological department, in other words, provided instruction in responsible consumption.
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In addition to defending the Ford social mission to the outside world, Marquis served as its cheerleader within the company. A couple of years after assuming his position, he had changed the title of his department's representatives from “investigators” to “advisors,” and in January 1917 he assembled the group to give them one of his famous pep talks. Marquis assured the groups that they were “the center of all sociological work in the world; there is no work being done anywhere that is attracting so much attention as this work in this department of the Ford Motor Company.” He reiterated the humanitarian, economic, and social-justice dimensions of the Ford program and trotted out his favorite line: “It is not paternalistic …it is fraternalistic; we are not trying to be the fathers, but the brothers.” Henry Ford, Marquis explained, had made the company's social advisers his agents in a special kind of work. “Five dollars a day won't do anything for a man,” he declared. “You have to get the men in the way of right living, of looking toward the future.” To accomplish this task, a Ford adviser must himself be a person of integrity, upright character, thrift, and sincerity, while holding fast to a faith in basic human goodness.

The stakes were high, Marquis pointed out. The failure of the Ford profit-sharing plan would represent a larger failure of enlightened labor policies, and could plunge industrial society into class warfare. The sociological department could stave off such a calamity, and Marquis stirred his advisers to this task: