From the One Best Way to The Way Forward to One Ford

AS THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY’S PLACE in multiple national economies deepened in the decades after World War I so, too, did analysis and assessment of the political and cultural implications of Ford’s various presences. No one offered greater insight into the promise and peril represented by Ford than Antonio Gramsci, despite the stark limits imposed on him by incarceration and the multiple deprivations that attended it. In “Americanism and Fordism” Gramsci described the process through which the United States had relatively easily “made the whole life of the nation revolve around production” through a combination of “force … and persuasion.”...

From the Melting Pot to the Boiling Pot

At Ford’s Rouge plant, the welfare activities that would earn Ford its reputation around the world were replaced by brutality, surveillance, and arbitrariness in the control of workers. The Rouge plant came fully on line as the new home of Model T production as European immigration to the United States was being curtailed by war and then nearly stopped through the immigration restrictions of 1924. The chapter situates managerial changes in this new reality. It also considers the built environment and management of the Rouge plant in relationship to Ford managers’ political interests in fascism and fascist political interest in Ford. Indeed, the Rouge plant functioned transnationally not as a model of racial integration but as an inspiration of Nazi factory management, a fascist-like factory state run by managers who, at times, professed strong affinities for fascism.

Ford Goes to the World; the World Comes to Ford

As the workers of the world came to the United States and to Detroit, Ford went into the world. This chapter details the massive global expansion of the Ford Motor Company that was made possible by the changes in the labor regime and the patterns of social reproduction of immigrant workers in Ford’s Highland Park plant. In the Highland Park years, Ford managers bossed—and the “sociologists” he employed molded—immigrant workers thought to be of multiple European “races.” They were required to participate in Americanization programs that included learning to speak English and professing allegiance to new values on and off of the job.

“Work in the Factory Itself ”

This chapter examines how the Poor White Investigation of the Carnegie Corporation provided a social-scientific rationale for the racial segregation of industrial work with which Ford, who would become one of the most powerful multinational employers in South Africa, complied. Targeted during the antiapartheid movement to divest, the roots of Ford’s relationship with this racist state are in the 1920s and 1930s, built on Ford’s reputation for racial paternalism and so-called progressivism in the United States. In South Africa, an interest in Ford’s processes of mass production and mass consumption were both mobilized in projects of racial improvement, though the Carnegie report specifically endorsed the idea of work in the factory as the most effective route to the racial improvement and discipline of so-called poor whites, recommending “white managerialist” efforts to address the “problem of poor whites.”

Breeding Rubber, Breeding Workers

From 1925 to 1945 the Ford Motor Company engaged in an experiment in social engineering at its new rubber plantations in the Amazon, Fordlandia and Belterra. This chapter demonstrates how fully in line with the aspirations of Brazilian politicians and modernizers Ford’s intervention was. Further, the company’s belief in the racial improvability of Amazonian people structured the very location and construction of the plantations. Specifically influenced by what it perceived as the racial potential of the people in the region, Ford first recruited single men and then whole families to the plantations. Social and biological reproduction of children replaced attempts to improve rubber tappers who resisted Ford’s importation of its “one best way.”

Out of the Melting Pot and into the Fire

The Rouge plant was the first Ford workplace—or any auto company—to hire significant numbers of black workers, who were recruited along with Mexican workers, by the thousands. This chapter challenges the notion that paternalism is the framework through which to understand Ford’s relationship to black workers, and it also considers Ford’s involvement in racial-uplift projects in two contexts more aptly described as “colonial” than “paternal.” In 1932, the company purchased the “black town” of Inkster, Michigan, its segregation partly premised on Ford’s failure to stand up for fair housing in and around Dearborn. Credited with saving the residents of Inkster from the crisis of the depression, Ford’s Inkster “experiment” was modeled on a plan of debt peonage and perhaps consciously on constructed a colonial relation with African Americans in the United States. In 1936, Henry Ford bought one million acres near Savannah, Georgia, restarting a plantation he named Richmond Hill. There the company launched a series of Jim Crow social-uplift projects designed to save the white residents from racial neglect and the black residents from themselves.

The Color Line and the Assembly Line

IN 1903 HENRY FORD INCORPORATED the Ford Motor Company. That same year the sociologist, historian, and activist W. E. B. Du Bois published this remarkably prescient claim: “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races in Asia and Africa, in America and in the islands of the sea.”...