The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (41 page)

Samuel Marquis' reform work at the Ford Motor Company won him admirers among progressives around the United States. Labor leader Samuel Gompers was so impressed with Marquis that he appointed him to membership on the Section on Industrial Training, a division of the United States government's Committee on Labor during World War I. Marquis
also struck up a strong friendship with Ida Tarbell when she visited the Ford plant in the spring of 1915. Over the next few years, she and Marquis exchanged letters, compliments, and ideas on reform work among industrial workers.
³³

More radical reformers were not so admiring. John Reed, who interviewed Marquis in 1916, claimed that he was little more than a lackey of the wealthy, “a man who for many years preached the gospel of Jesus Christ to the predatory rich so inoffensively that they built him the most sumptuous church in Detroit.” Upon joining Ford, this writer continued, Marquis had become a moralizing busybody who subverted Ford's revolutionary wage policy by burdening it with insidious rules of conduct. The minister's smooth voice and assertive, confident manner underscored his powerful position, and his practical bent drove his interviewer to conclude that his “gospel, as far as I could make out, is Efficiency.”
³⁴

But this was a minority report. Most reformers believed that Marquis' infusion of progressive political and social principles into the Ford sociological department—encouraging a fuller, richer life among industrial workers, creating habits of responsibility that encouraged private virtue and community cohesion, helping to heal the rift between capital and labor—portended to a brighter future for American society.

An even deeper impulse inspiring Marquis, however, involved spiritual yearning. He believed he was part of a great moral crusade at the Ford Motor Company. Shortly after taking over the sociological department, he told the New York
Tribune
that this work demanded the attention of every “public-spirited Christian.” “I believe that I could have preached and lived a more vital, practical Christianity had I done something of this kind earlier in my ministry,” he confessed. Marquis recalled years later that he had felt “part of a great experiment in applied Christianity in industry. The spirit of service, helpfulness and cooperation permeated practically the whole organization…. Here was a corporation with a soul.” To this reform-minded minister, the company's melding of industrial regeneration with spiritual salvation created an intoxicating sense of mission.
³⁵

Marquis' vision of the sociological department gained power from one final source—a mechanistic view of human nature that mirrored the sensibility of the surging automobile industry. Combining a positivistic mind-set derived from nineteenth-century science with a modern managerial commitment to efficiency, Marquis viewed human beings as, literally, machines that required constant tune-ups to run smoothly and productively. He had unfolded this model in a 1912essay in
Ford Times,
which the company later reprinted and distributed as a pamphlet. Marquis' title
—The Man: On the
Scientific Self-Management of a One Man-Power Three Cylinder Engine
— revealed much about its content.
³⁶

Marquis' mechanistic metaphor unfolded relentlessly. He noted the existence of an engine that was capable of producing enormous power if managed scientifically. “It has three cylinders; is cast in one piece; has a self-starting device, and is automatically controlled,” he described. “It was first installed in the Garden of Eden and was called ‘The Man.’ ” Each of the cylinders developed a different kind of power—physical, mental, and moral—but each needed to be in perfect condition for the human engine to obtain the best results.
³⁷

Although scientists and mechanics had been studying machines for centuries, Marquis argued, only recently had people found it worthwhile to examine the human mechanism. The results were remarkable. It had been discovered that “the human engine—like the steam plant in its early days— is wasting a great deal of power, and that this waste can be stopped by scientific management.” Moreover, it was clear that the intelligent direction of one's own energies and talents—what Marquis termed “scientific self-management”—held the key to financial success, emotional contentment, and personal happiness. It was simply a matter of the individual's striving “to find out how he can get the most out of this three-cylinder engine of which he is the owner and engineer.”
³⁸

Marquis told readers exactly how to go about it. The scientific self-manager must study each of the three cylinders in the human engine. First, he should observe the “physical cylinder” of the body and avoid abusing it with bad diet, excessive passion, or alcohol. Second, the scientific self-manager must examine the “mental cylinder” and practice “mental control” to acquire knowledge and avoid fear and worry. Finally, he must focus attention on the most powerful element in his engine, the “moral cylinder,” and cultivate useful, respectful relations with others, a task that demanded firm moral principles. Proper self-management, Marquis concluded, kept “every cylinder running” to propel the individual on his journey to the top.
³⁹

Marquis ended his service with Ford in January 1921 when enthusiasm for the moral mission of its sociological department began to wane. This became evident when company production managers, after several years, objected to the constant scrutiny of workers' lives and behavior. Sociological investigators were calling men away from work during the day to discuss domestic or moral matters. Managers such as Charles Sorensen grew furious at such interventions and refused to let workers leave their jobs. A contest of wills ensued as the two parties took their quarrel to the top. Marquis complained to Henry Ford about Sorensen's countermanding his directives,
and Sorensen denounced Marquis' meddling. After months of mutual recrimination, the two were summoned one day to Ford's office, where a shouting match erupted. Marquis proved a match for the volcanic Sorensen. “I had always treated clergymen with deference,” Sorensen noted much later. “Many times in my life I have been called an s.o.b., but never before or after was I called one by a supposed man of God—in fact, that day I heard from Dean Marquis some words I had never heard before.” But Ford refused to back Marquis, and he resigned his post a few days later. In a postscript penned several years later, Marquis noted that powerful men who “never ceased to ridicule, criticize, and misrepresent the efforts put forth to improve the human relations within the industry” had gained Henry Ford's ear and subverted the noble crusade of “the corporation with a soul.” The days when an enlightened corporation “set justice and humanity above profits and production, were gone.”
⁴⁰

But during the mid-1910s, everything had seemed possible in an industrial enterprise where moral conduct mattered as much as production. Samuel Marquis' efforts with the sociological department had demonstrated the Ford Motor Company's commitment to a curious kind of reform blending twentieth-century managerial efficiency with nineteenth-century Victorian moralism. This impulse also appeared in another company endeavor: an educational project designed to Americanize the tens of thousands of immigrants who had come into the Highland Park factory to help make the Model T. Here, too, the Victorian moral reformer joined hands with the modern industrial manager.

In Detroit, as throughout urban areas in the United States, immigrants constituted a large percentage of industrial workers. Almost half of the twenty thousand employees manning Ford assembly lines and machine shops were recent arrivals in the United States. Many of them were mired in poverty and spoke only their native tongue. Walking through Highland Park in the early 1910s, an observer hearing the babble of voices in languages from around the world would have faced an unavoidable conclusion. The Model T, much like America's industrial society in the early twentieth century, was produced by men from many nations.

In Henry Ford's eyes, however, this mass of immigrants created significant difficulties. As he told a journalist in 1914, “Foreign laborers cannot become American citizens, learn to spend more money for living and efficiently enjoy freedom and citizenship unless they can speak, read, and write
English.” Two problems loomed particularly large. First, workers' lack of English-language skills presented an impediment to effective management at Highland Park. According to one Ford manager, it was “utterly impossible to reach these men with an explanation of our work through the medium of interpreters.” Second, the failure of immigrant workers to assimilate into the American mainstream often translated into a reluctance to embrace the tenets of modern industrial society: disciplined labor in a factory setting, the pursuit of consumer abundance, the shaping of a clean, cozy domestic setting for the family. Too often, upon arriving in Detroit, recent immigrants had been set upon by corrupt ethnic bosses who steered them toward stores or tenement buildings owned by those same men. As a company official observed, “It is to the interest of such men that these foreigners shall know nothing of the English language, of American ways and customs … which would liberate them from the bondage.”
⁴¹

Henry Ford believed that these problems demanded solution. In his words, “These men of many nations must be taught American ways, the English language, and the right way to live.” Acting partly out of self-interest, the company sought to Americanize workers as a way to instill work discipline and assert the company's control over the process of industrial production. Acting partly out of benevolence, Ford and his managers saw Americanization as a way to build a social and cultural framework that would support a raised standard of living for workers in the new atmosphere of consumer abundance. The sociological department had provided one prod toward Americanization, but the educational project launched about the same time proved even more far-reaching in assimilating immigrant workers.
⁴²

In April 1914, the company secured the services of Peter Roberts, a YMCA teacher, to develop a program in English-language instruction. He had a background working with immigrant miners in the Pennsylvania coalfields, where he had published an instructional booklet entitled
English for Coming Americans.
This text outlined a practical approach to teaching the language that offered three series of lessons—one focusing on domestic life, another on commercial transactions, and a third on industrial situations. With titles such as “Table Utensils,” “The Man Washing,” “Going to the Bank,” and “Beginning the Day's Work,” these lessons combined the learning of basic grammar and vocabulary with lessons in proper behavior and values.
⁴³

The Roberts Plan became the foundation for the Ford English School, which was established in May 1914. Henry Ford instigated the program and believed strongly in its mission. A journalist who interviewed him concluded
that the school “is the child of his brain and is near his heart.” The school faced a daunting task. The company estimated that workmen in the Ford shops represented some fifty-three nationalities and spoke more than one hundred languages and dialects. Classes began on a small scale, with a single instructor and about a dozen students. Within a few months, however, the operation expanded dramatically.
⁴⁴

By late 1916, the Ford English School was enrolling twenty-seven hundred students per session and had engaged 163teachers. The school offered lessons taught in a thirty-six-week session, two lessons a week, for an hour and a half each. Three meeting times were created to meet the huge numbers: one at 8:30a.m. for men leaving the night shift, one at 1:30p.m. for men slated to begin an afternoon shift, and one at 3:30p.m. for those leaving the day shift. Attendance was compulsory for non-English-speaking workers. According to Marquis, “A man who declines to take it is laid off for a couple of weeks in order that he may have time to think it over. If after further persuasion he refuses to attend the classes he is given an opportunity to find employment elsewhere.” For teachers, the program drew upon company volunteers who had a solid grasp of English and a desire to help. They spent three months in a teacher-training course, then served as substitute instructors, and finally were eased into teaching regular classes. The instructors also enjoyed a fellowship of their own, forming a Teachers' Literary Club that met twice a month to discuss and debate books.
⁴⁵

The Ford English School taught by means of dramatization and mass recitation. Part of the Roberts method included “dramatization of all the sentences; that is acting out all of the ideas to be conveyed,” as a way of teaching vocabulary, grammar, and practical phrases. The instructor would go through the motions of bathing, for example, while saying, “I wash myself,” as the class recited the sentence in concert. This method encouraged a participatory, even carnivalesque atmosphere. According to one observer, “Twenty-five men shouting the lesson together arouse a great deal of good feeling, and in a few minutes, the day's work is forgotten.” A few weeks after the birth of the school, Henry Ford, accompanied by two visitors, dropped by to observe a lesson. With twenty laborers who spoke eleven languages, the class presented this scene: