Vaughan on Segal, 'Recasting the Machine Age: Henry Ford's Village Industries'


Howard P. Segal. Recasting the Machine Age: Henry Ford's Village Industries. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. xvi + 244 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-55849-481-7.

Reviewed by Rob Vaughan (American Studies Department, University of Hawaii at Manoa)
Published on H-Utopia (March, 2007)

The Machine Shop in the Garden

From the 1910s until his death in 1947 Henry Ford developed and expanded his mammoth Michigan automobile production complex at River Rouge in Dearborn. At the time, it was among the largest, most centralized industrial facilities in the world. Every day tons of raw materials and small parts were delivered by ship, truck, and rail to one end of the factory complex. Out the other end came a steady stream of cars, trucks, and farm equipment. Inside, thousands of managers, engineers, designers, craftsmen, and common laborers toiled as cogs in an intricately complex manufacturing machine. Outside, the sky was turned black by smoke-belching foundries, mills, and power plants. Henry Ford's River Rouge was an industrial marvel, admired throughout the world. It made him a hero of the new machine age and an avatar of America's industrial future.

During this era of explosive growth the Ford Motor Company, like most of its industrial rivals, was becoming more centralized in its manufacturing and managerial functions. However, it was also a time when Henry Ford personally embarked on a plan to decentralize production by developing a system of scaled-down factories located in nearby rural areas and small towns. It was a dream of the great innovator to create a network of what he called "village industries" to supply the needs of River Rouge and other factories. But they would do more than that. The village industries would act as vehicles of social as well as technological change. Ford believed that these shops, often located in the abandoned saw mills and grist mills of the southeastern Michigan countryside, would preserve America's rural values and folk culture; balance the country's agricultural past with its technological future; improve employee morale (as well as employee morals) by allowing workers to keep "one foot in industry and another foot in the land"; discourage labor unrest and put a check on union organizing; foment closer bonds between managers and workers; and, most significantly, improve quality and profits for the Ford Motor Company.

Howard P. Segal's Recasting the Machine Age is the first systematic study of Henry Ford's village industries. It is an excellent examination of this often overlooked aspect of America's industrial past. Segal, Bird Professor of History at the University of Maine Orono, is a noted scholar whose specialty is the history of technology. Originally inspired to undertake this project in 1980 while on a guided tour of ten of the original nineteen village industries sites, Segal builds upon the work of previous scholars, such as business historian David L. Lewis. He also adds to the growing body of literature on technology's influence on culture and society. Recasting the Machine Age joins such books such as Cecelia Tichi's Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (1987), David E. Nye's American Technological Sublime (1994), and John F. Kasson's Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America (1976).

In researching Recasting the Machine Age Segal has amassed a wealth of resources from dozens of archives and collections. In addition, he has taken several oral histories of the men and women who worked in these experimental production facilities. He has woven this extensive research into an informative narrative that recounts the story of Henry Ford's dream of re-establishing small-scale manufacturing in rural America. He also explores the larger theme of decentralization in American business, a theme that had been advocated by both industry and government leaders since the early twentieth century. In addition, Recasting the Machine Age connects Ford's village industries with more recent developments, such as the "small is beautiful" movement of the 1970s and the growth of high-tech business parks in California's Silicon Valley and along Massachusetts' Route 128 corridor.

Recasting the Machine Age begins with an epigraph drawn from a 1938 Life magazine profile of the great industrialist and his village industries dream. "Henry Ford would be less than the man he is if, walking by the River Rouge, he did not thrill at the sight of his huge plant growing huger and huger by the day. But the old man's dearest dream is no longer of piling building on building in metropolitan congestion. A farm boy who has kept his love of the land, Ford now visions the 'little factory in a meadow' as the future shape of American industry.… Henry Ford is convinced that, for happiness and security, the worker of the future must divide his time between factory and farm" (p. vi). Thus, Segal poses the first of several questions regarding Ford's reasons for instituting the village industries project. First, was Henry Ford's dream of a "little factory in a meadow" just a knee-jerk reaction to the changes in the land his huge factories helped unleash? Did the sight of his massive foundries and stamping presses trigger in him nostalgia for the more human scale of Longfellow's village smithy? Second, were there other, more sinister motives involved? By decentralizing production and transferring work to the countryside was Ford really just trying to stymie union organizers who were, despite the union-busting efforts of his notorious "Service Department," already flexing their muscle at his urban plants? Third, were the village industries just another way to streamline operations by decentralizing production, cutting costs, and maximizing profits? Was this just one more example of the great innovator tinkering with his assembly line and experimenting with a new method of vertical integration? Fourth, and most important, was Henry Ford's plan ultimately a utopian quest of social and mechanical engineering? Would the village industries, the twentieth-century version of Leo Marx's "machine in the garden," be used to remold American industry (and its growing workforce) into Henry Ford's vision of the ideal society?

Supplying answers to these questions is no easy task, for Ford, like most historical figures, was an amazingly complex and often contradictory man. Segal himself admits that "Henry Ford's motives for building and funding the village industries are multiple and murky" (p. ix). Despite this opacity, however, Recasting the Machine Age quite ably manages to sift through the various rationales offered by Henry Ford, his publicity department, suspicious labor leaders, Ford employees, contemporary journalists, and business historians. The result is a compelling story about the dream of an iconic industrialist and his efforts to use his village industries to transform both industrial production and American society.

First, the village industries were, in part, a reaction to the social fallout associated with large-scale manufacturing. As Segal points out, Henry Ford remained conflicted about the threats to America's agrarian way of life (caused in good part by his factories and the machines that they churned out). "[He] never resolved his mixed feelings about modernity: above all, the congestion, heterogeneity, rootlessness, impersonality, inequality, and materialism of twentieth-century American cities. 'The modern city has done its work and a change is coming,' Ford told the journalist Drew Pearson in a 1924 interview. 'The city has taught us much, but the overhead expense of living in such places is becoming unbearable…. The cities are getting top-heavy and are about doomed'" (p. 3). Ford realized that the giant factories of industrialized America were attracting rural and immigrant workers to the big city. Many of these employees were unattached, single men who stayed in boarding houses and cheap hotels. In their off hours they frequented saloons, burlesque shows, and bordellos. Freed from the constraints of the family farm and village life, the modern factory worker was increasingly susceptible to the temptations of the depraved city. If left unchecked, such a situation would no doubt lead to an unreliable workforce and the demise of everything Ford believed America stood for.

Workers in Ford's village industries, on the other hand, were expected to be part-time farmers, running up to hundred-acre spreads in their off hours and during slack seasons at the plant. Ford believed so much in farming's benefits to mind, morals, and health that he was even willing to provide garden plots to landless factory workers just so they could raise some of their own food. Thus, village industries workers would be able to keep "one foot in industry and another foot in the land"--while driving a Ford between the two. Small-town America would be revitalized, as would American agrarian values and folk life. Rooted to the land, the rural workforce would help balance the ill effects of big city factories.

So, Ford's solution to the problems of the modern factory was not simply a headlong retreat into the past. His village industries were not just reconstructions of old manufacturing buildings and a duplication of the antiquated production methods they once housed. His make-over of grist mills and other small-scale industrial buildings scattered around the Michigan countryside was nothing like the reconstruction of Colonial Williamsburg, which was undertaken at about the same time.[1]

At Ford's converted mills there would be no displays of old-time crafts such as candle making, quilting, or butter churning. His dabbling in historic preservation was not meant to display an obsolete past with buildings and production practices trapped in amber. There would be no evoking of nostalgia for a bygone era. Rather, the village industries were for showcasing a usable past, one that would couple the best of previous eras with the latest technology. As Segal writes, Ford's village industries were to be "sophisticated alternative forms of [an] emerging technological society, intended as models for others to emulate" (p. 7, emphasis in original). They were not recreations of village life, but rather industrial successors to the nineteenth-century Massachusetts manufacturing towns of Lowell, Lawrence, and Waltham, which were also pioneering industrial communities located in pastoral locales. Although Ford's village industries might have been located in old grist mills, complete with functioning water wheels and set among bucolic greenery, these small-scale plants were equipped with the latest technology, with machinery that converted soybeans into plastic parts or churned out precision gauges, car horns, or headlight assemblies.

Second, although some have suggested that Ford's attempts at decentralization were primarily a way to neutralize the growing power of labor unions at River Rouge, the truth is not so simple. As Segal argues, even though the village industries did in fact make it more difficult to organize the small, relatively isolated shops, this was not Ford's primary motive. If union busting was his main goal he would have shifted large branch plants to the South where labor was weak and right-to-work laws favored employers. Yes, unions suffered under the village industries project, but Ford saw it more as a beneficial side effect than as the main motivating principle.

Third, the question of whether or not the village industries made economic sense to the Ford Motor Company as a whole, Segal tells us, is largely unanswerable. They remained a private project of Henry Ford himself, more laboratory experiments than profit centers subject to sharp-eyed corporate accountants. Besides, the haphazard state of the company's books, even as the Ford Motor Company became one of the world's largest manufacturers, made determining profitability of individual production units difficult, if not impossible. Yet, decentralization was a business principle that Henry Ford embraced wholeheartedly, as did many of his fellow industrialists and government policymakers. Managers at River Rouge saw early on that completed Model T's could only fit four to a railroad car. While in their disassembled state, the same rail cars could hold ten to twelve automobiles. It was not long before Model T's were shipped as parts with final assembly done in Ford's California or East Coast plants. If decentralized production like this could produce huge savings, it became accepted that similar economies might be realized in the village industries project.

Fourth, was Henry Ford's village industries experiment a utopian project, one man's vision of creating a more perfect America through social engineering? This is, perhaps, the most intriguing question raised in Recasting the Machine Age. Howard Segal has addressed the topic of technology and utopia in previous books, including Technological Utopianism in American Culture (1985; 2005) and Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America (1994). In addition, he has written on other aspects of technology and utopia in several published papers and reviews. Recasting the Machine Age can be seen as an addition to this outstanding body of work. In short, Segal argues that by the time of the village industries project Henry Ford had become both a social engineer as well as a mechanical one. He saw himself forging men as well as machines; remaking American society as dramatically as his factories had transformed the landscape.

Although he was not one to immerse himself in history books,[2] and it is unlikely Henry Ford was acquainted with America's many previous utopian experiments, his village industries should be seen as part of the utopian tradition in the U.S. He too felt that by perfecting the nature of work he could perfect the individual and society. Segal describes New Lanark, Oneida, and the Shaker communities, all of which established small-scale industries within rural settings. (Although he does not mention Brook Farm, it should be noted that they constructed a relatively large, steam-powered shoe manufacturing plant in the Massachusetts countryside.)[3] Yet, Ford's enterprise was different from these communitarian and cooperative ventures. As a highly individualistic, self-made man Ford found communitarian ventures an anathema. As an unreconstructed capitalist with a top-down view of organizational hierarchies, he disdained cooperative schemes as artificial ways to drive up prices. And unlike George Pullman, the Sleeping Car King, whose model town of Pullman was meant as an example for progressive industrialists, Henry Ford refused to consider building worker housing because he felt it would destroy their initiative. Nor did Ford wish to build a "company town." He had no desire to control the political or economic lives of his workers. (It is curious, however, that Segal makes no mention of chocolate mogul Milton Hershey's eponymously named model town in rural Pennsylvania, the construction of which overlaps Ford's village industries. It might have made for an instructive comparison, especially regarding the role of work in a pastoral, small-town setting.)[4]

Nevertheless, Henry Ford's village industries project was far more than an experiment in manufacturing decentralization. At its heart was nothing less than a utopian attempt to transform American society by synthesizing the values of its agrarian past with its technological future. Despite eschewing the communitarian and cooperative ideologies of the majority of American utopian experiments, Ford's village industries were conceived in the same transformative spirit. Constructing a "machine shop in the garden," as Henry Ford set out to do, is an integral part of America's capacity to dream, and to construct the perfect society. Howard P. Segal has written an important book that extends the scholarship of both the history of technology in America as well as its utopian ideals.

Notes

[1]. In fact, the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg was funded largely by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the oil magnate's son, after Henry Ford declined to become involved.

[2]. Once, while under oath in a civil trial, Henry Ford admitted he had never heard of Napoleon.

[3]. See Sterling F. Delano's Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia (Cambridge. Mass.: Belknap/Harvard, 2004).

[4]. See Michael D'Antonio's Hershey: Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).

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Citation: Rob Vaughan. Review of Segal, Howard P., Recasting the Machine Age: Henry Ford's Village Industries. H-Utopia, H-Net Reviews. March, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12953

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