Ford Goes to the World; the World Comes to Ford

The worker who works for Ford is an individual who produces the means for a multiplication of the points of contact between individuals, but paradoxically he produces it precisely thanks to his own imprisonment for hours on end at the point of production, where he is deprived of the right of movement to an extent hitherto unheard of.

FERRUCCIO GAMBINO

All this was beginning there at Highland Park. He was building his own power-plant, his own steel plant, his own forges. Presently he would have his own iron-mines, coal-mines, ships, and railroads. It would be a gigantic empire, spreading over the whole earth.

UPTON SINCLAIR

NEAR THE NADIR OF THE Great Depression's misery, and at almost the same moment that Aldous Huxley and Antonio Gramsci published their classic accounts of life after Ford, the acerbic U.S. historian Charles Beard edited an anthology titled America Faces the Future. The collection featured an optimistic essay by William Trufant Foster and Waddill Catchings, which answered in the negative its title question, "Must We Reduce Our Standard of Living?" Foster and Catchings, whose prior collaborative work occupied the extensive gray area between economics and self-help, insisted that asking whether Americans could "maintain our standard of living against the rest of the world" was the wrong question. The United States did not prosper "against" the rest of the world but as a model for it. As they argued, "Every prolonged rise in our own standard of living has brought higher living standards in every other part of the world." The evidence that clinched the argument in support of this assertion was simple: "Nearly every nation has sent a commission to us to find out the secret of our prosperity; and we have sent abroad one of our citizens, by the name of Ford, to expose that secret in terms of scientific management, mass production, and high wages." From their point of view it was because of Ford that the United States had "rendered other nations the conspicuous service of a conspicuous example."

The possibility that Ford's success would make the United States a world-conquering empire of good example also suffused the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci's work on Ford. However, Gramsci reckoned that national differences would shape the rejection of Fordism as well as its reception, leading to different patterns of partial transformation in Europe, which was the object of his concern during the rise of fascism. It was, ironically enough, the novelist Aldous Huxley who through his imagined, dystopian account of a "brave new world" expressed fuller confidence in the idea that the Fordist model would remake everything, everywhere. Despite differences, each of these intellectuals treated the Ford system as a model, a good or bad set of compelling ideas and practices being emulated, sought after by managers, and sometimes resisted outside of the United States. Concerns about how Ford's ideas were diffused and how the company was received locally are at the core of this book. Since Fordism was not only an idea to be discovered by the rest of the world, but also a kind of commodity aggressively marketed and relocated to every inhabited continent, Ford's own efforts to become a global power deserve the full accounting that they receive in the first half of this chapter.

Moreover, the Ford system was so appealing to foreign governments not only because of its technical improvements and promises of high wages. As the balance of the chapter shows, Ford became a world corporation in the United States as the workers of the world came to it and were forged into Americans. The Fordism of the pre-union period reached into homes to promote social innovations designed to reshape the habits, families, consumption, language, and values of racially suspect European immigrants. These practices — and the workplace discipline that attended them — contributed to Ford's cachet among the international elites it worked with in expanding its empire beyond U.S. borders. From the early twentieth century, this chapter shows, Ford defined the inside and the outside of the United States. Likewise the uneven, unequal larger world defined it.

THE WORLD AS A MARKET

When the handful of Ford shareholders met in 1903, just four months after the company's incorporation, acting secretary James Couzens reported the return of a clear profit. The small group agreed to reinvest their earnings toward the already-planned expansion of the firm from its Detroit-based Piquette Avenue workshop to the new Highland Park assembly plant that Albert Kahn had been designing with Henry Ford. Simultaneously, the board ratified a decision to "take all necessary steps to obtain foreign business." These two early and simultaneous decisions — to transform the scale of its U.S. production and to seek out foreign markets for Ford cars and Fordson tractors — are critical to understanding the breadth and depth of Ford's dramatic growth.

The imagined scope of the foreign business was expressed by an early Ford lieutenant, William S. Knudsen, in terms as grandiose as they were specific. On the one hand, the reach of the company anticipated by its early plans revealed an almost absurd belief in U.S. diplomatic and political capacity. On the other hand, more than a decade before the United States entered World War I Ford was initiating a foreign-investment strategy that prefigured the massive postwar expansion of U.S. firms into world markets in material but also profoundly political ways. In 1919–20 Knudsen traveled across Europe. The map he followed both on his trip and in his description of Ford's emerging and future world-presence reveals the imperial structure the company relied on to further its own ambitions:

The British Division would embrace the United Kingdom, Egypt and Malta, with headquarters in Manchester ... The Northern Division would comprehend Scandinavia, Finland, the Baltic States, Poland and at first Germany and Holland ... Obviously, Germany and Holland would in time demand separate facilities ... The Central Division, with headquarters in Paris, would include France, Belgium, Switzerland and Algeria and would set up assembly plants as they were needed ... The Southern Division would cover Italy, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Tunis and Tripoli, with an assembly plant in a convenient Spanish city ... The Adriatic Division would embrace Central Europe south of Germany, the Balkan lands, and Asia Minor, and would have headquarters and an assembly...