The Wild Wheel

ONE SWEAT IN PARADISE

IT WAS Sunday. We were making up the forms of “The Annalist” in the composing room of the New York Times when Mr. Ochs appeared, threading his way toward us between the turtles. His arms were held a little out, as if he were bearing a load on his chest, and his eyes were wide and staring. By these signs we knew his mind was buzzing. When he spoke it was hardly above a whisper, saying:

“He’s crazy, isn’t he? Don’t you think he has gone crazy?”

We knew what he meant. The news was in the morning paper that the Ford Motor Company had announced a minimum wage of five dollars a day for all employees down to the floor sweepers; the day’s work at the same time was cut from nine to eight hours.

The year was 1914. Only those then living at an age of awareness can believe what a sensation that announcement made, not here only but all over the world. Until then the Ford Motor Company had been paying the prevailing wage, which was a little over two dollars a day.

American industry was rocked to its heels. Four kinds of ruin were commonly prophesied. First, Detroit would be ruined by an exodus of employers; second, those who remained and tried to meet the Ford wage scale would go bankrupt; third, the Ford Motor Company itself would fall; fourth, the Ford employees would be demoralized by this sudden affluence; they wouldn’t know how to spend the money.

I said to Mr. Ochs: “It might be well to have a look. I’ll go out and see.”

The barber who shaved me the next morning at the Book-Cadillac in Detroit said: “Our Mr. Ford has gone crazy. Did you know?”

At breakfast four men came to my table to confirm the barber’s opinion. They were employers of labor. I asked them if they were going to leave Detroit, and they said they were. Ford could have it.

Meanwhile an event of inverted cruelty was building itself on the Ford hiring lot. When the thing happened, the bitter people of Detroit made the most of it. In near-zero weather, from before dawn until dark, thousands of wistful men were milling about in front of the employment office, which of course was swamped. They came from everywhere. It was tidal migration, rising in the hills and valleys and in other cities, like a gold rush—from the two-dollar day to the five-dollar day. Word went forth that only a few more workers were needed and these would be found in Detroit. That had no effect at all. Every incoming freight train brought more of them, shivering in empty freight cars or clinging to the bumpers, with the light of a five-dollar job in their eyes. No matter how it got there, a motley of ten thousand disappointed and wretched men, standing on the cold side of the door to a wage earner’s heaven, would become restive and a little ugly. It obstructed traffic and refused to disperse. Then the police were called in; and what was perhaps the most innocent mob that had ever assembled itself anywhere was scattered by icy streams from the fire hose.

The plant was then at Highland Park. River Rouge came later.

I spent the next two days with Ford. He made it seem quite simple. He said: “If the floor sweeper’s heart is in his job he can save us five dollars a day by picking up small tools instead of sweeping them out.”

Years later he wrote:

“Unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers. One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers. The real progress of our company dates from 1914, when we raised the minimum wage from somewhat more than two dollars to a flat five dollars a day, for then we increased the buying power of our own people, and they increased the buying power of other people, and so on and on. It is this thought of enlarging buying power by paying high wages and selling at low prices that is behind the prosperity of this country.”

That was in his book Today and Tomorrow,1 which he did in collaboration with Samuel Crowther in 1926. The complete theory had by that time arrived—the theory, namely, that the wage earner is more important as a consumer than as a producer. How much of that formulation was Ford’s and how much of it Crowther’s one cannot say. They wrote several books together, with Ford speaking in the first person as I or we, and the ideas were entirely his own, but as he conceived them they were wordless revelations or sudden flashes of insight. It was Crowther’s part to clothe them with reason and argument and house them in proper premises.

Ford knew something about the behavior of his own mind. He would say: “We go forward without the facts.” Or: “We learn the facts as we go along.”

To which Crowther would add some rhetorical phrases on vision for the pioneer and facts for the plodder.

I once asked Ford where ideas came from. Did he beat them out of his head or stare them out of a blank wall?

There was something like a saucer on the desk in front of him. He flipped it upside down and kept tapping the bottom with his fingers as he said: “You know atmospheric pressure is hitting there at fourteen pounds per square inch. You can’t see it and you can’t feel it. Yet you know it is happening. It’s that way with ideas. The air is full of them. They are knocking you on the head. You don’t have to think about it too much. You only have to know what you want. Just suspend in your mind the thought of what it is you want. If you do that, then you can forget it. You can go about your business thinking and talking of other things, and suddenly the idea you want will come through. It was there all the time.”

Then one day I saw it work. I was in Cameron’s office when Ford came in unexpectedly, just looking around. “You,” he said to me, sitting down and putting his feet on the desk, “are just the man I want to see. You are one person I think of who can make this subject of money clear to everybody.”

It happened at that time that money was his obsessional diversion. He had but recently induced his bosom friend Thomas A. Edison to invent a new kind of money; the Edison plan, already published, had turned out to be one of the quaint additions to the queer side of monetary literature. Even Ford seemed to know that.

I said: “The trouble is, Mr. Ford, I’ve learned that I don’t know anything about money.”

“Good!” he said. “That’s why you can do it. The people who write on money all begin with knowing too much about it.”

With that he was off in his most voluble manner. What was money? It was holy water. Here was the largest automobile company in the world. Did money do it? Money had nothing to do with it. Here he was, supposed to be one of the very rich men in the world. But look (turning his pockets inside out). He had no money. Yet of course money was necessary as a sign. The use of it was to enable people to exchange things of value. But it ought to be that simple. The bankers had so bitched it up, with their speculations and manipulations, that now nobody could understand it. If only—

And so the monologue went for more than an hour. Cameron wearily looked at the clock and said it was time for lunch. Ford led the way; as we were going through the door Cameron held back a little and muttered to me: “Do you wonder how so much chaff can come out of what you know to be really a fine mill?”

At the lunch table Ford went on, not from where he had been interrupted but from a new beginning, until the soup was served. Then suddenly his tall body stiffened; the expression of his face, which had been very lively, changed to that a sleepwalker, and he said to no one in particular—to himself, really: “A-h-h! I’m not thinking about that at all.” With no other word he rose abruptly, kicked back his chair and walked rapidly away. An idea that he had been wanting had come through and he was gone to do something about it.

Cameron said: “That happens often. He won’t be back. We may not see him again for a week.”

2

THE facts that “came afterward” from the five-dollar day were startling, some in kind and some in degree. That the buying power of the Ford wage earner alone was increased had in itself no social meaning—not then, not until a high-wage policy began to make itself felt as an example throughout American industry. But the immediate effect upon the individual was electric, and this was an effect produced not by five dollars a day in his pocket but by the contrast between the Ford wage and a wage anywhere else. That was what determined the man’s attitude toward his job.

During that first visit with Ford we spent most of two days in the plant. That was where he loved to be. He hated the office and was uneasy there. The spectacle of work excited his mind.

I had learned to know the sounds of industry, particularly the difference between the rhythm of a piece-work shop and that of a time-pay shop. The music of manufacture has in each case a certain tempo, and as it crashes on your ear you will remember, if you happen to know it, the chant of the old flax breakers—

B-y . . . t-h-e . . . d-a-y . . . B-y . . . t-h-e. . . d-a-y . . . B-y . . . t-h-e . . . d-a-y.

Bythepiece-Bythepiece-Bythepiece.

Well, here it was all by the day, and yet never had I heard a rhythm so fast in a piece-work shop.

At that time a great deal of material was moved in dolly bins trundled by hand along the floor. A man at the top of a long aisle would start toward us with his bin and come so fast that he couldn’t stop short if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to stop or slow down and it was Ford who had to leap aside to let him pass. And that was all you had to see. The labor cost of producing an automobile was falling before your eyes because every worker in the place was like the man with the dolly bin. Five years later, when the minimum wage had been increased to six dollars a day, Ford said:

“The payment of five dollars a day for an eight-hour day was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made, and the six-dollar-a-day wage is cheaper than the five. How far this will go we do not know.”

The next rise, to seven dollars a day, occurred in 1929, after the great stock market crash, when everybody else was thinking of how to cut wages. This was Ford’s dramatic contribution to the hope of immediate recovery; and unhappily it had very little effect. It did not even increase the buying power of Ford workers, because almost immediately the Ford plant had to go on short time.

Two years later, when the whole country was in the slough of despond, I found Ford playing around with his supreme hobby, which was Greenfield Village, as if he had nothing else on his mind.

I said to Cameron: “He thought he had the answer to depression. Now how does he take it?”

Cameron said: “I don’t know. He doesn’t talk about it much. It’s so terrible that I believe he doesn’t dare let himself think about it.”

For a man who normally had hair-trigger opinions on any subject under the sun, his silence at this time was notable. The reflections to which he gave any expression at all, privately or publicly, were either puerile or grotesquely inadequate. Several times he said it was probably a blessing. Everything that people were saying about it was wrong. He was sure of this because people were always wrong. But that was as far as he could get.

It was a chasm that his mind apparently could not bridge. For years he had been saying: “We need have no slumps in business. We need never have unemployment. Our recipe for hard times is to lower prices and increase wages. And it would take the efforts of only a few large companies thus to check the panic of any depression.”

Business, indeed, might have its ups and downs, but they were unimportant because—

“We have attained such speed that slowing down for economic crossings or curves does not mean anything. When the limited passing through crowded sections cuts down from sixty to thirty miles an hour, it does not mean the train is going to stop or even slump. But those who are fearful are always looking out for signs of a slump. Often it would seem that neurasthenics manage business.”

And he knew what caused the slowings down. Business Was continually putting the profit motive over what he called the wage motive. When business thought only of profit for the owners “instead of providing goods for all,” then it frequently broke down—so frequently that scientists had invented what they called “business cycles.”

But in those simple terms you could not explain the Great Depression, and even if you thought you could, what good would it do? Merely to increase wages was not the answer. At the onset of the depression he had tried that, with no result whatever.

Moreover, from the first five-dollar day, which was his famous example, there had been a bonanza effect—an effect upon the worker’s productivity and therefore upon labor costs—that could not repeat itself. Remember, it was not the five-dollar wage that produced that effect; it was the doubling of wages that did it. As other automobile manufacturers followed his example and adopted his methods, five dollars a day became the prevailing wage in Detroit and the special incentive of the Ford wage was lost. Could he double wages again—to ten dollars? If so, could he double them again to twenty dollars? The productivity of labor could not be increased that fast. The method of increasing it in a marvelous manner, by bringing the work to the man on an assembly line and breaking each man’s task down to a few repetitive reflex motions—that method had been discovered once for all. It could no more be discovered again than a gold deposit. It could only be worked harder, perhaps against the law of diminishing returns. In any case, there was no magic in the Ford wage as such; the magic was what he got for the wage he paid.

And so it was that Ford, who discovered familiar things with the innocence of first-seeing, discovered that the matter of wages was a very complex matter indeed; and the more he thought about it the more grim he was.

3

HERE the threads of irony begin to appear in the weave. By example and precept and with the authority of success, one man had caused a revolutionary change to begin in ways of thinking about wages and profits and what business was for. On that account both labor and industry owed him an immense debt and both paid it in bad coin. He came to be hated by labor, which found his discipline too hard; and industry could never forgive him for what he did to its complacency.

In the end he was defeated. A new time came. Now Ford workers smoke at their tasks as workers do everywhere else, their unions tell the management how fast they will work and for what wages, and the Ford Motor Company prices its cars as all other automobile makers do. All this he lived to see.

About midway of his experience with a high-wage policy, the minimum by that time having reached six dollars a day, Ford came to this reflection:

“We don’t know what the right wage is and perhaps we shall never know. The world has never approached industry with the wage motive—from the angle of seeing how high wages may be—and until it has we shall not know much about wages.”

Then he tried this definition:

“The right price is not what the traffic will bear. The right wage is not the lowest sum a man will work for. The right price is the lowest price an article can steadily be sold for. The right wage is the highest wage the employer can steadily pay.”

Perfect perhaps as a generalization; and yet it leaves unaccounted for so many variables and so many elements of guess, judgment and hazard that it can hardly be taken as a working rule whereby wages may be determined. For example, what of the profit that comes from better method and engineering, more intense technology, better tools put into the hands of the worker? To whom does that belong? How shall it be divided? Ford said:

“It is not long since the emphasis in industry was on profit for the owner. The emphasis now is on profit for the wage earner. The narrow capitalist and the narrow trade unionist have exactly the same point of view. They differ only on who is to have the loot.”

His final conclusion was that the profit belonged to the public, and he arrived at it by this process of thought:

“Take the wage side. Wages furnish purchasing power, and the whole of business depends on people who are able to buy and pay. On the other hand, when special pleaders begin to declare that wages should absorb all the economies, all the increased profit made possible by industrial improvements, it becomes necessary to call attention to the class nature of that limited point of view. Most of our improvements are internal, that is, they occur within the management of the business, the laying out of the work, the simplifying of the method, the saving of useless labor and wasted material, all of which permits the service to be rendered at less cost than formerly.

“There are three ways in which this decreased cost, which is really increased profit, might go. We could say: We will keep it all, because it was our ability that made it possible. Or we could say: We will put it into the wage envelopes. Or we could say: It costs less to produce this thing, therefore the selling price ought to be reduced to give the buyer the benefit.

“In the first instance the argument would be: The extra profit belongs to those whose brains made it possible. In the second instance the argument would be: The extra profit belongs to the workers, they are the producers. In the third instance the argument would be: The buying public has the right to necessities and service at the lowest possible cost.

“Stating the arguments gives the answer. The benefit belongs to the public. The owners and the workers will get their reward by the increased amount of business the lower prices bring. Industry cannot exist for a class.”2

The only source of profit was work—not hard work but work well done. There was a difference. A man might work very hard with his hands and never make a good living. Indeed, it was self-evident that a great majority of people were not capable either mentally or physically of making a good living for themselves—that was to say, they were unable with their hands to create the amount of goods the world needed, and therefore certainly not enough to exchange for the goods they themselves needed. That was where the machine came in.

His definition of work well done was to create something that satisfied a human want and sell it at a price everybody could afford to pay. That meant to create it in great quantity. Men working with their hands could never produce that result, nor could they ever earn high wages. Moreover, you would never be able to find enough men with skill in their hands. “A million men working with their hands,” he said, “could never approximate our daily output.” And even if they could, how could you manage a million men? But if you built skill into the machine, set the machines close together, and caused the material to flow continuously through them, then you did two things at once, namely, you made it possible for even unskilled workers to earn high wages and, secondly, with the product you satisfied human wants that could not otherwise have been satisfied at all—provided only the workers were willing to mind the machines with diligence.

That was the pattern. Ford went so much further and faster with it than anybody else that it came to be known as the Ford idea.

Some said he had taken skill out of work. His answer was that by putting higher skill into planning, management and tool building, he made it possible for skill to be enjoyed by the man who was not skilled.

4

THE material effects were astounding. It was a method that did multiply wealth in a marvelous manner. It made it possible for anybody to own an automobile, including every Ford worker.

But it had other effects concerning which there could be diverse opinions. It required of the worker a kind of automatism corresponding to that of the machine he minded. He could not stop, nor slow down, because it was all in one moving chain.

The norm of efficiency—even that was transferred from the individual to the group. The individual in his own free way might be able to produce more than the average, but as one of a group there would be no point in it, for then he would have to wait on the others; on the other hand, if he produced less than the average he slowed down the work and was removed.

But man is not an efficient animal really. He likes to pause, to look at the chips, smoke, walk about a little, and then return to his work by an impulse and rhythm of his own. Secondly, it required a regimentation of the workers all the way down to the movements of their feet while at work.

For example, the piston rod assembly. It was a very simple operation. The foreman could not understand why it should take three minutes. He analyzed the motions with a stop watch. Four hours out of a day were spent in walking, as the assembler gathered in his materials and pushed away his finished work. The operation was split into three parts, a slide was put on the bench, three men on each side of it and an inspector at the end. One man then performed only one third of the operation without shifting his feet. Where twenty-eight men had turned out 175 assemblies a day, now seven men turned out 2,600.

Some of the repetitive work was so monotonous that Ford himself wondered how a man could stick to it. There was one man who did nothing but dredge small gears in a vat of oil at the end of a rod and drop them one at a time in a basket. This required neither intelligence nor energy, yet he did that and nothing else for eight years, saved his wages and resisted any attempt to move him to another job, confirming Ford in the opinion that “the average worker wants a job in which he does not have to think.”

And perhaps it would be just as well for a man not to think; the machine could do his thinking for him. There was one who got to thinking he was lopsided, but that turned out to be something that had happened not to his body but to his mind. Ford told the story to prove his case that repetitive labor was not harmful: “There was one case of a man who all day long did little but step on a treadle release. He thought the motion was making him one-sided. The medical examination did not show that he had been affected. But of course he was changed to a job that used another set of muscles. In a few weeks he asked for his old job back.”

To save time and overhead and to keep the feet still, machines were placed closer and closer together until you might have thought they were jammed; but the room a machine worker needed had been calculated to the inch; also the cubic content of the air space above him, so that each one got the necessary amount of oxygen, and none wasted. “We put more machinery per square foot of floor space than any other factory in the world,” said Ford. “Every foot of space not used carries an overhead expense. No man has too much room and no man has too little.”

By the mechanical extension of the man the productive power of labor was enormously increased. Thus an hour of labor, being more productive, could be more highly rewarded. If you were going to keep wages going up and prices going down, as Ford intended, there was no other way to do it, and so far all to the good. But man is more than a vessel of labor. This was something that had happened to him. His role in it was passive. And thoughtful people began now to ask seriously for the first time:

Which is the slave—man or machine?

Ford’s answer was to pose the problem of a man unable to earn a good living without machinery. Would you withhold the machinery because attendance upon it may be monotonous? Or would you put him in the way of a good living? And would a man be happier for using the machine to less than its capacity? Would he be happier for producing less than he might and consequently getting less than his share of the world’s goods in exchange?

The less the machine requires of the worker in the way of skill the more it demands of him in the way of obedience, and this to the point at which you may hardly say which is acting—the reflex of the machine or the reflex of the worker who releases its power by stepping on a treadle or touching a button. In the hands of a skilled mechanic the hammer and chisel are obedient to his will, and it is a beautiful thing to watch. Set a dozen cutting tools in an automatic machine, driven by power, so that to produce a certain predetermined transformation of the raw material the worker has only to perform a series of perfunctory motions, and what have you? The man who performs the perfunctory motions must absolutely obey the principles of the machine. Put thousands of such machines side by side with a perfunctory man in front of each one, then see that the material flows, and you have mass production. But you have also the necessity for extreme discipline. The man must be an automaton too.

This Ford would not deny. Men had to do as they were told. No organization so highly specialized, one part so dependent on another, could permit human beings to be willful. Without the most rigid discipline there would be hopeless confusion. He thought it could not and should not be otherwise in industry.

The man will work fewer hours. He will exert himself less to produce more. He will have more time for play afterward, and the money to play with; but the hand at work will have no time for gladness.

He did not believe in the glad hand. He did not believe in the personal touch. It was too late for that. A great business was really too big to be human. It had supplanted the personality of the man. There were men who must always have an atmosphere of good feeling around them before they could do their work. In the end they were failures. There was too much reliance on good feeling in business organizations generally. He wanted as little as possible of the personal element. It was not necessary for people to love each other in order to work together. Too much good-fellowship could be a very bad thing, with one man trying to cover up the faults of another. Some organizations used up so much energy and time maintaining a feeling of harmony that they had no force left to work for the object for which the organization was created. A factory was not a drawing room. There need not be much personal contact. Simply, a man did his work and went home.

5

THESE are hard sayings. To do his work with no gladness in it and then go home. Was that what a mass production worker was for?

Henry Ford’s answer to that question was both yes and no. The yes meant that the worker was an eight-hour automaton, serving the strict demands of the industrial process. In that character he was a Ford invention. The no meant that for the rest of his time the man was a human being with a free life to live. Even as an automaton he was better off than he had ever been before, for if he were not here performing repetitive tasks in this clean and air-conditioned environment he would be selling his muscle in animal drudgery, digging ditches in the sun or trying to wangle a living out of a Kentucky hill farm.

If the appearances were that the machine enslaved him, even for eight hours, you were obliged to consider what the machine had done for him in his other character as a free human being. It enabled him to go home earlier, to have a house such as no other unskilled worker had ever been able to afford, and to go to and fro in an automobile of his own. Beyond all that, you had to think of him impersonally, in relation to a machine organization which, for all its hardness, did multiply the wealth and leisure of society and increase the satisfaction of everyday living in a fabulous manner.

It would have been easier for the mass production worker to see himself as Ford saw him but for a certain contradiction. He was expected at the same time to be a self-resourceful individual in all circumstances, so that if he offended the deity and got fired or if the machine stopped, as it sometimes did, he could go forth on his own and take care of himself.

An idle machine creates no wealth, but neither does it eat. An idle man likewise creates no wealth, and yet he must eat. Here an impasse occurs between two ways of thinking.

In Henry Ford’s philosophy, the machine was an elemental force, blindly creative, like nature. How to release it was man’s greatest discovery. The consequences were social and tremendous and might bring many new problems, but these would be problems of hitherto unimagined plenty, and you might trust them to solve themselves; or you might think of the consequences as you think of food as a consequence of rain. But if the machine were not held relentlessly to its elemental function the magnificent effects either would not follow or would be in any case less extravagant. Therefore the machine must not be worried about the individual, any more than nature is. Consider nature, how thoughtful she is for the species and how careless of the single member.

Ford once said that industry does not exist to support people.

That was the kind of startling thought that often grew on the Ford tree, like an air plant, with apparently no roots at all.

If industry does not exist to support people, what is it for?

His answer was that the purpose of industry was to multiply and cheapen the cost of things that satisfy human wants.

To do its job properly it had to be efficient; to be efficient it had to be impersonal and ruthless, according to the laws of its own necessities. You could build skill into the machine; you could not build into it both skill and sentiment. Social ideas such as continuity of employment or spreading the work were sentimental.

It might well be that some parts of industry were better off working on a seasonal basis. In that case seasonal unemployment was not the industry’s fault but the fault of men looking for a year’s support from an industry that could give only half a year’s work. If an industry could work steadily through the whole year, so much the better, but continuous employment must not be gained by spreading work and wages thin. Nothing was to be gained by thinking in that direction.

Yet he himself had been sometimes obliged to act in that direction. He had been forced in some emergencies to depart from this policy, spreading work among a number of men, giving each man a few days a week. But he regarded it as a makeshift and, in this scientific age, one that industry ought to be ashamed of.

Whatever went wrong with his theory, this one or any other, the fault was with people. If all industry were scientifically organized and efficiently managed, then human livelihood, he thought, could be made as secure as the supply lines that brought raw material to the machines, and the basis of a home could be as solid as the basis of a factory; and if, for all that, it should happen that a man found himself out of a job, he could very easily save himself. How? That also was simple.

The trouble with a man out of a job was that he went looking for another job instead of looking for work. If he looked for work he was bound to find it. Ford said of himself that he had often been out of a job but never out of work.

There was always plenty of work for everyone; it was not possible for any man to do useful work without in some fashion receiving adequate payment. He thought that if the jobless men even in the big cities would attack the work they might see everywhere waiting to be done, they would quickly find that they had made good jobs for themselves, instead of waiting for jobs. Let them seek work before wages.

Such was the philosophy with which Henry Ford approached the tragic failure of his career. This is remembered as a failure in labor relationship. Its meaning was much more than that. It was the failure to create a satisfactory race of machine people; or perhaps it was only that he tried to create it before its time.

6

HIS feelings for people were those of a shy, sensitive, egotistical man; but his feeling for the machine was an original passion. One may believe that he was the first to see what the machine was for. The right use of it was not simply to increase the leverage of man’s animal power, so that he might perform his work with less exertion. No. But if you learned its inexorable laws and obeyed them the machine would transform society in a wonderful manner, set it free from immemorial and wasteful drudgeries, fill its life with new and miraculous things, and give it time to enjoy them.

A world that never could be made with hands.

If you regard the machine in that light you may see that its demands will be imperious. Once it was that a man could think of the machine as serving him. Then a time of paradox comes. The machine itself demands to be served, for unless it is served according to its own laws it will be unable to perform its miracle.

Does it then enslave the man who serves it?

Ford said no. The only slave left on earth was man minus the machine. That you could see in other lands—men and women hauling wood and stone and water on their backs, artisans clumsily spending long hours in toil for a paltry result, low standards of life, poverty to the edge of disaster. Such were the conditions where men had not learned the secrets of the machine.

Yet as you watched the men on the Ford assembly line there was no doubt about what you saw. The machine was not the hand of the man extended; the man was the hand of the machine. The man was serving the machine, and the service was both docile and servile. If the hand failed the hand was wrong and the machine was right.

If from the end of the assembly line you followed the automobile out into the world, then you saw what Ford meant. Unless human beings were serving the machine, and serving it according to its own law, people could not have these automobiles. And you might understand also what Ford meant when he said it was a sin—a sin against the welfare of society—to use a machine at less than its full capacity. “Is the man happier”—the man who serves the machine—“for producing less than he might and consequently getting less than his share of the world’s goods in exchange?”

But the feeling of the normal mass production worker was compounded of neither affection nor gratitude. He did not invent the machine. It was not a tool he could select or fashion to fit his hand. It was the hand of him that had to fit the machine; he could touch the machine only by a series of disciplined dexterities, to actuate it; and if anything went wrong he could not fix it. An expert was called to do that. Certainly he could never have that feeling for the machine that a woodsman has for his ax or the old-fashioned mechanic for his hammer and cold chisel, with which he could smooth a plate of steel as if it had been passed through a planing lathe.

And as for seeing how it transformed the world, even a world that included him—well, yes, he could see that dimly; and yet he knew that in that same world, for all its high common welfare, the anxieties of life were still acute and personal. That he might own an automobile made it not always easier and sometimes even harder to take home the bacon.

The world that Henry Ford imagined, with every home as solid as a factory, did not exist, any more than the contented mass production worker.

So long as the Ford wage was incomparably the highest wage for unskilled and semiskilled men, the Ford worker was loyal to the Ford job, but even this was more fear of losing the job than loyalty. During this time Ford evidently thought he was creating a race of docile machine people. They willingly stretched themselves and submitted to the machine’s discipline, which was terrific.

But when the prevailing industrial wage in the Detroit region began to catch up with the Ford wage, so that workers could choose, the loyalty of the Ford worker was much short of what Ford expected. When the wage at General Motors or at Chrysler or any other automobile plant was as high as the Ford wage, the picture began to change. Ford’s “wage motive theory” of industry could not perform repetitive miracles; and his advantage as the manufacturer who paid the highest wage and had therefore the lowest labor cost was lost.

Partly it was transferred to the motor industry as a whole. As a high-wage industry, owing principally to Ford’s example, it was for a long time practically a union-free industry. Unionism was defeated by the high wage. What had unionism to offer to these workers?

7

THEN came the Great Depression, and with it the Wagner Labor Act, which transferred power from management to labor; and the unions moved in, led by John L. Lewis. The wage rate was still high, but the wage rate was no longer the measure of labor’s welfare. What mattered was the take-home pay, that is to say, the bacon; and what with the distress of unemployment and the hardships of part time at the high wage rate, labor in the Detroit region was in great trouble.

The union leadership was adroit. First, General Motors was struck, and while its plants were down Ford and Chrysler went on making cars. General Motors could not stand that for long.

During a celebrated conference in the governor’s office at Lansing, Walter Chrysler beat his fist on the table and said to Lewis:

“This isn’t fair. You shut us down one at a time.”

Lewis said:

“Chrysler, that’s the first reasonable thing you’ve said since this conference started. I agree with you. It isn’t fair. And I’ll tell you how we’ll fix it. Tomorrow I’ll close you all down.”

After that Chrysler threw in the sponge and signed a labor contract.

That left Ford, alone of the Big Three, standing by himself. For a long time he stood alone against the union.

Because he was going to be a very tough customer the union hesitated to take him head on, preferring rather to build up a legal case against him before the National Labor Relations Board. The Ford Motor Company’s violations of the law were flagrant and contemptuous. The behavior of its workers was the concern of the largest and perhaps the most ruthless private police force that was ever known in American industry. Every worker suspected the man at his side, who might be a company informer; if he went to a union meeting he was watched; if he indicated a sympathy for unions he was fired.

I said to Ford at this time: “You are going to lose this fight.”

He asked: “Why do you say that?”

I said: “Because you are on the wrong side of the law.”

His answer was: “There is a law of the job higher than any law Congress can pass. The law of the job will prevail.”

His feeling against unions was bitter and personal. It rested on two grounds. First, he intensely resented the idea that unions could do more for Ford workers than he did for them. Secondly, unions committed the unforgivable sin of interfering with the machine. They slowed it down. They insisted on running it at less than its full capacity. That was to say, as was already evident in the General Motors and Chrysler contracts, they laid their hands on production. They bargained about how fast the assembly line should run.

The feud was desperate and ugly on both sides. There were scenes of violence at the gates.

But the tide of a new social order was irresistibly rising. Labor was arriving. No single large organization of industry, not even the Ford Motor Company, could afford not to make peace with it. The law was on the side of labor, and under the law the union had built a case so damaging that a complete public revelation of it might have destroyed the myth that the Ford worker was the contented darling of mass production, who never would have wavered in his loyalty but for the nefarious activities of the union leaders, egged on perhaps by rival industrialists and Wall Street. The most ardent believer in this myth to the very end was Ford himself. He never understood why he had failed.

When at last he surrendered he did a characteristic thing. He went overboard. He gave the union more than it asked for. He signed a contract more favorable to labor than General Motors or Chrysler or any other competitor had signed—a contract that provided for compulsory unionism in Ford plants, the collection of union dues by the management out of the pay envelope, a union label for Ford products and badges for all members of the plant police, so that never again would they be able to infiltrate themselves among the workers.

Was it a victory over Ford, as labor thought, or was it a victory over the machine?

In either case, as you may suppose, it was too much for the hotheads. Where before workers were not permitted to smoke anywhere on the premises or to lounge at ease when the assembly line broke down, now they dragged in vats of victory beer, played craps in their leisure moments, smoked as they liked, and made anybody’s tiff with a foreman the occasion for a wildcat strike.

At last the union leaders had the good sense to side with management in forbidding wildcat strikes, on pain of lay-off or discharge. The machine commanded order. That was its minimum exaction.

Later Ford was induced to meet the labor leader who had beaten him. William C. Richards, in The Last Billionaire,3 relates that Ford said to the labor leader: “It was a sensible thing we did, getting you into the plant.”

The labor leader said: “That’s what we think. We didn’t know you thought so.”

Ford said: “Well, you’ve been fighting General Motors and the Wall Street crowd. Now you are in here and we have given you a union shop and more than you got out of them. That puts you on our side, doesn’t it? We fight them together from now on, don’t we?”

A brave and rueful statement, tainted by a lifelong superstition concerning his imaginary enemies and melancholy in the twilight of his career.

More and more after that it was the organization that carried on. The tyrant’s hand relaxed. His most dogmatic theory had been badly damaged. Was it unsound? In any case, it assumed a world that did not exist. Perhaps it was only misplaced in time.

8

BUT in the Ford cosmos there was an astronomical first law that never failed. You could not define it, or if you could it would be something else. It came to be a disembodied force in itself, like a demon spirit, demanding sacrifice, burnt offerings and worshipful rites. Its name was production.

The spectacle of production is visible phenomena, and yet incomprehensible to the mind. There is no point of view from which you can see where it begins or how, or what moves it. In a moment of bemusement the thought may occur to you that what you are looking at is planetary. It moves itself. Nobody does it. Human agencies are present and accessory, but somehow irrelevant, as if it were necessary only that people should have something to do.

I knew a Ford production boss who once dreamed it that way. He saw the mighty plant as a whole, production taking place at high speed as if the feud with time might be lost, finished automobiles chopping off like sausages at the end of the assembly line at the rate of one a minute, and not one human being there, union or nonunion—only Ford as a phantom in every doorway, holding a stop watch. And coming awake from the dream was not like a return from anywhere strange, because it had seemed so almost real.

The struggle with union labor came to a crisis in wartime. A conflict of such bitterness might have been expected to wreck production. It did not. The Ford contribution to national defense was, nevertheless, prodigious—a contribution of things the great mechanics had never made before, such as guns and gun mounts, tanks, amphibious vehicles, aircraft engines and bomber parts; and the Willow Run bomber plant, designed by Sorensen, to cut off a bomber an hour at the end of the assembly line, was epic.

9

IT WOULD never have occurred to Ford to think labor had been ungrateful. It was only that the mind of unionism had not been able to understand what he called the wage motive for industry, over the profit motive. His theory of the wage motive forbade him to expect gratitude. When he doubled wages in the first demonstration, and when after that he raised them again, generosity was ruled out. It had to pay. It had to benefit everybody—the consumer, the wage earner and the Ford Motor Company. When organized labor rejected his wage motive theory, in fact ruined it, the old disastrous fallacy was restored—the fallacy, namely, that the rate of wage was determined by the bargaining power of labor acting against the monopoly power of the employer.

High wages, he insisted, were more important to business than to labor. Low wages would break industry much more quickly than they would break labor.

He was thinking there not of old industry but of new industry, based on mass production. And why would low wages break that kind of industry sooner than labor? Because an underpaid man was a customer reduced in buying power. He was a poor customer. If you reduced wages you actually reduced work because you reduced the demand for work.

There was in fact no standard of wages, no limitation upon them except that set by the efficiency of industry pursuing the wage motive. If you set yourself to pay high wages, then you would find methods of manufacturing that would make high wages cheap wages.

Nor was the wage motive theory in any sense a social theory. Nearly every social theory, he believed, was a formula for living without work. And the world being what it was, all such theories could lead only to poverty because they were not productive.

Nevertheless, the impact of the original five-dollar day upon the lives of Ford workers was so terrific that he felt he had to look at what they did with the money. Did they use it to improve their standard of living or did they waste it? So he was persuaded to set up a Social Department, with a staff of trained social service workers, to impose upon these high wage people a code of living. They had to be sober, they had to like work and they had to be family-loving. Since now for the first time they could afford decent homes, they were forbidden to take in boarders. That was a custom among them that made the home “a place to make money out of rather than a place to live in.”

That was his first experience with paternalism. In a few years he was sick of it. He distrusted social service workers as a strange race and their language bothered him. Suddenly, out went the Social Department. Let people manage their own lives.

What if they did not use their spare time to the best advantage? That was not for the Ford Motor Company to say, provided their work was better. The average man would find his own best way, even though that way might not exactly fit into the programs of the social reformers.

Although the fact that people had more leisure and more money was wonderful in itself, it was nothing they should be expected to feel grateful for. The truth was that to provide more leisure, and then the money with which people could enjoy it, had become a necessity of mass production industry.

Why? Well, was not the influence of the shorter work week on consumption obvious? If factories generally went back to the ten-hour day, industry would suffer because people would not have time to consume the goods produced. For instance, a workman would have little use for an automobile if he had to be in the shop from dawn to dark. Of course there was a humanitarian side to the shorter day and the shorter week, but dwelling on that side was likely to distort the view, for then leisure might be put before work, instead of after work, where it belonged.

And that was something the machine had done. That was the world that could not have been made by hands. The hours of work, he insisted, were regulated by the machine and by the large-scale organization of work and by nothing else.

That was in 1930. He could see no limit to it.

Paternalism, moreover, had an air of charity about it, and that he hated; he thought very ill of charity. “It is a drug,” he said. There were emergencies when men and women, and especially children, needed help, but these cases were not actually as numerous as they seemed to be. The very fact that charity could be had increased them, for charity held out the promise of something for nothing. The cases of real need could be looked after on a personal basis without destroying, as by the machinery of organized charity, the values of self-respect.

All of his own charities were governed by that theme. He once made a home for orphans and afterward told of his disappointment with it. Once a week he went to see how it was getting on. The managers, who were supposed to be qualified men, seemed to think of it as a place in which to confine children. So he scrapped it and got the children adopted into private homes. The sickliest boy of all was adopted by a woman who already had six of her own.

From all of these excursions he came back to the same place. What mattered above all was the wage. Not a social wage, not a generous wage, not a wage arrived at by the bargaining power of either labor or the employer, but a scientific wage determined by the wage motive. There was no social service that could take the place of wages. Let the wage be the highest that mass production could afford to pay and you would not have to worry much about people. It was very simple, really. Any confusion about it could usually be traced back “to an unwillingness on the part of someone to work.” It was management’s part so to arrange and organize work that it could produce high wages, but the starting point of high wages was the willingness to work. Without that willingness, management was powerless.

And that held as much for work of the mind as for work of the hand.

How long could industry last on the purchasing power of those whose income was independent of what they received from work? The country was maintained by work. And the evidence of work was wages.

 

4 Today and Tomorrow, by Henry Ford. Copyright 1926 by Doubleday & Co., Inc.

5 Today and Tomorrow, by Henry Ford. Copyright 1926 by Doubleday & Co., Inc.

6 The Last Billionaire, by William C. Richards. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948.

• 1* Today and Tomorrow, by Henry Ford. Copyright 1926 by Doubleday & Co., Inc.
• 2* Today and Tomorrow, by Henry Ford. Copyright 1926 by Doubleday & Co., Inc.
• 3* The Last Billionaire, by William C. Richards. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948.
• 4That was in his book Today and Tomorrow,* which he did in collaboration with Samuel Crowther in 1926. The complete theory had by that time arrived—the theory, namely, that the wage earner is more important as a consumer than as a producer. How much of that formulation was Ford’s and how much of it Crowther’s one cannot say. They wrote several books together, with Ford speaking in the first person as I or we, and the ideas were entirely his own, but as he conceived them they were wordless revelations or sudden flashes of insight. It was Crowther’s part to clothe them with reason and argument and house them in proper premises.
• 5“Stating the arguments gives the answer. The benefit belongs to the public. The owners and the workers will get their reward by the increased amount of business the lower prices bring. Industry cannot exist for a class.”*
• 6Later Ford was induced to meet the labor leader who had beaten him. William C. Richards, in The Last Billionaire,* relates that Ford said to the labor leader: “It was a sensible thing we did, getting you into the plant.”