The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (42 page)

The school curriculum followed the Roberts blueprint by including practical lessons based on daily actions, social encounters, and work tasks. But it also sought to inculcate middle-class values of hard work, sobriety, punctuality, and cleanliness—“such matters as the proper care of the body, bathing, and clean teeth,” according to a report in
Ford Times.
Some lessons focused on etiquette, such as the correct way to be introduced and shake hands, and the proper way to conduct oneself at the meal table in terms of being seated, using napkins and utensils, and adding condiments to food and drink. As Samuel S. Marquis once explained to an audience, “We have our professor of table manners who teaches the art of eating a meal in a manner that will not interfere with the appetite of the other fellow.”
⁴⁷

The Ford English School made a special point of teaching the fundamentals of American government to its immigrant students. As Marquis put it, the curriculum sought to “make the men more efficient in our work in the shop, but also to prepare them for citizenship. The first thing we teach them to say is, ‘I am a good American,’ and then we try to get them to live up to the statement.” After observing one of the lessons that instructed pupils in the democratic voting process and the basic principles of the Constitution, Henry Ford declared to an accompanying reporter, “Great, useful, and patriotic citizens are to come out of this school.”
⁴⁸

One of the most fascinating aspects of the curriculum, however, concerned its subtle inculcation of consumer values. Many of the lessons underlined the skills necessary to purchasing goods and services in a modern society of abundance. With titles such as “Pay Day,” “Going to the Bank,” “Buying a Lot,” and “Building a House,” they taught immigrant laborers how to
navigate among a host of bewildering choices regarding the spending of their enhanced paychecks. As Marquis explained, “We not only teach a man how to earn more money, but we begin at once to teach him how to spend it. Lessons on how to use money are just as important as lessons on how to earn it.” Company pamphlets aimed at immigrant employees argued that learning to speak English would help them transact their own business and make their own choices about buying articles. The English School sought to convert immigrants to the American idea of abundant living. “Thrift is construed by the average foreigner as meaning to live cheaply as possible, while the American-born often construes it as meaning the opposite,” one of its pamphlets stated. “[After proper schooling] the foreigner now knows the meaning of the phrase ‘American standard of living.’ ”
⁴⁹

The Ford school's program of Americanization was illustrated dramatically in its graduation ceremonies. On July 5, 1915, all foreign-born employees of the company gathered for a patriotic march through the heart of Detroit. Some five thousand strong, and led by sixteen hundred students from the English School and a detail of Boy Scouts, the group walked in orderly fashion the two miles from Highland Park to City Hall. After a mass singing of “America,” the crowd cheered a welcoming speech from Detroit Mayor Oscar B. Marx.
⁵⁰

A short time later, the school held its first graduation ceremony. The graduates and their guests listened to inspirational addresses, drank refreshments, and enjoyed several musical offerings. The graduates then lined up to receive official diplomas signed by Clinton D. DeWitt, superintendent of the school, as well as by Lee, Couzens, and Henry Ford himself. Then came the dramatic highlight of the proceedings—the pageant of the “Ford Melting Pot.” Behind an elevated stage sat a large, painted backdrop of an ocean steamship, from which a gangway led down into an immense cauldron labeled “Ford English School Melting Pot.” The graduates filed across the stage and down the gangway into the cauldron, from which they emerged waving small American flags to the cheers and applause of the audience. According to
Ford Times,
this exercise was “symbolic of the fusing process which makes raw immigrants into loyal Americans.”
⁵¹

To admirers of Henry Ford and his company, the sociological department and the English School complemented the Five-Dollar Day as important elements of an industrial reform agenda. For critics, however, these social programs represented unwarranted intrusions of corporate power into the private lives and values of workers. Though not an exercise of naked authority in the older style of the robber barons, they offered a subtler but equally sinister form of social control by a wealthy, powerful industrialist. A debate opened over the merits of Ford's social “reforms,” one that began slowly but soon gathered momentum and passion over the years.

In mid-1916, John Reed sat in Samuel S. Marquis' office in Highland Park, on assignment to examine Henry Ford's experiment in industrial reform. Though an admirer of Ford's Five-Dollar Day and his enlightened sentiments, Reed loathed the sociological department and its agenda. This program, he wrote, “interfered in the most sacred matters of a man's private life.” It “set up a conventional settlement-worker's code of morals” and then “constructed an elaborate system of spying all over Detroit to report lapses of morality and bad habits.” In his view, the investigators of the sociological department exercised “an intolerable tyranny” over Ford workers. Reed was determined to call Marquis to account for these sins.
⁵²

After Reed recited his litany of complaints, Marquis made his standard defense of the program. He argued that it helped workers take care of their money and improve their home lives while, simultaneously, helping the company because men worked better when their private affairs were in order. “It is not a paternal system,” Marquis declared in his favorite turn of phrase; “it's fraternal.” Unswayed, Reed peppered the minister with questions suggesting that any self-respecting worker would resent the company's attempt to impose its standards of conduct. Marquis' anger flared. “We find that the only resentment comes from those that are doing wrong and want to conceal something,” he shot back. “Besides, if they don't like it they needn't come here. A man has the choice of taking a job with the Ford Company or somewhere else.”
⁵³

This confrontation between Reed and Marquis reflected a larger debate. As the acclaim over the Five-Dollar Day subsided and news spread of its accompanying sociological requirements, disagreements emerged, some of them acrimonious, among newspaper editorialists, social critics, and representatives of business and labor. The crux of the issue, of course, was the intrusion of the company into the private lives of its employees. Was Ford's attempt to mold personal values and private behavior a legitimate expression of social reform, or was it an unwarranted attempt to extend corporate social control into the very homes of industrial workers?

About a year after the announcement of the Five-Dollar Day, the Congressional Commission on Industrial Relations took up the issue. Henry Ford appeared before this body to answer questions on his industrial reforms and the mission of the sociological department. He was asked why the Ford Motor Company sought to assume “so large a measure of responsibility, not only for the labor conditions in its plants, but also for the social and moral surroundings of its employees?” Ford explained his goal of improving his workers' home lives, their moral character, and thus their prospects for leading a fuller and more abundant life. A follow-up question: “Is it desirable for a corporation to assume so large a measure of control of
employees as the Ford Co. has done?” Ford replied that his social program reflected a “heartfelt, personal interest in the welfare of his employees” and that this concern not only helped the worker and his family but, by improving morale and contentment among employees, boosted the productivity of his company. This exchange—skeptical questions about the dangers of overweening paternalism on the one side, reassurances about the moral and economic virtues of the Ford social program on the other—occurred over and over in the larger public debate.
⁵⁴

Critics of the sociological department's agenda denounced Ford's intrusion in private lives as a thinly veiled exercise of power. The New Haven, Connecticut,
Journal-Courier
confessed that it did “not quite see Mr. Ford's right to regulate [his workers'] home life because he has made liberal allowances in their wage…. They want to live their own lives in their own way, advancing to a higher social status, if that is what it is, by processes of evolution, certainly not by processes of proscription.” Other newspapers denounced the Ford program as subverting American principles of liberty. “It is the American theory that when his day's work is over a free man is free…that so long as a man observes his obligations to society he is his own master in his own house,” declared an editorial entitled “Ford's Feudal System.” “The payment of good wages does not give an employer the authority to seek to regulate the internal family affairs of any man.”
⁵⁵

Most critics, however, focused on Ford's paternalistic impulse. The sociological department's requirements about personal values and private behavior, they argued, simply treated workers like children. This misguided agenda created dependence, not self-reliance. An editorial entitled “Paternalism at the Ford Works” put the matter eloquently. Though the Ford program had done good things in teaching English and encouraging proper living habits, the question remained “whether good citizens can be turned out mechanically, as are automobiles. Personal liberty is essential to good citizenship, and when the living of men and families is governed by outsiders as completely as if they were horses, it is to be feared that they may lose some of the stamina and independence which are inseparable from the best citizenship.”
⁵⁶

As for Ford workers, their reaction to the sociological department was mixed. Some approved of the scheme or did not publicly object to it. After interviewing laborers at Highland Park,
The Survey
reported that Henry Ford's workmen were “all going around grinning. Contrary to all precedent they welcome the official [sociological-department] investigator with open arms…. And there is talk everywhere of savings banks accounts and of the purchase of homes.” In fact, this state of affairs utterly frustrated radicals who sought to organize the Ford plant. An outraged John Reed denounced
the American Federation of Labor in Detroit for endorsing the idea that “Ford paternalism was beneficial to the men.” This action, he said, “makes one seriously doubt whether, after all, men should not be treated like slaves or children.”
⁵⁷

Workers' approval of Ford's social programs was not unanimous, however. In various ways, dissenters and grumblers at the company made their views known, although they did so carefully, to protect their jobs. William Pioch, a loyal Ford employee for many years, grew disgruntled when company investigators “went to my home. My wife told them everything. There was nothing to keep from them…. It was kind of a funny idea, in a free state.” John R. Lee confessed that the initial round of reports by investigators in the summer of 1914 “engendered a lot of apathy and ill-feeling” among workers. They complained, some in writing, that investigators were prying into their private lives. Lee warned his associates to be careful and steer clear of “things that are strictly private, that do not concern our work in the least.” An internal report written a year later by a supervising investigator, William M. Purves, admitted that “private affairs were needlessly pried into, confidences violated, and ungentlemanly acts perpetrated in the employees' houses” by many of his associates. Other signs of resistance also cropped up. As late as 1919, thirty-eight workers were dismissed at Highland Park for refusing to attend the Ford English School.
⁵⁸

But Ford's supporters also spoke out.
Leslie's,
a popular magazine, lauded him as “an evangelist of the doctrine of industrial reform for the benefit of the laboring classes,” and concluded that his social efforts at “encouraging the laborers to use their new-found wealth wisely” had benefited both the workers and the company. A trade journal,
The Automobile,
praised the Ford sociological department for pursuing a “kind of welfare work that is a man-to-man, character-building proposition,” and asserted that other companies “can well learn from what has been accomplished by this wonderfully large organization.” Newspaper editorials argued that Ford's program was based on the well-established connection among sociology, economics, and social uplift. “He does not wish to narrow their freedom or dictate to them where dictation is unwarranted,” one stated. “He simply asks them to conform to the American standard of decent living.” According to the New York
Sun,
the sociological department simply sought “to look after [workers'] health, to aid in their recreational opportunities, the education of their children, and in every legitimate way to further their general well being.”
⁵⁹