[Davidson was one of the major figures in the Southern Agrarian literary and critical movement that started at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s and included writers such as John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren. The Agrarians were politically conservative and espoused the value of agricultural life and labor; consequently, they were highly critical of industrialization. In the following essay, he criticizes Ford's materialistic, mechanistic, and capitalistic ideals.]

There is magnificence in this new book of Henry Ford's—this book of the splendid title, Moving Forward, which comes to us with the additional signature of Samuel Crowther as a kind of shrewd Boswellian collaborator. The title itself is a magnificent rebuke to Mr. Ford's fellow-industrialists, now wallowing sadly in the trough of business depression. And with what magnificent gall does Mr. Ford advise us, at this time of all times, that "the day when we can actually have overproduction is far distant"; that the five-day week and the eight-hour day must be still further curtailed; and that the familiar Ford doctrine of raising wages and lowering prices must go on indefinitely. Whether these pronouncements are wise or fool-hardy, I am not enough of an economist to say. I can well imagine that they may seem almost wicked to some merchants and manufacturers. I am more concerned with the theories of industry and of human life that lie back of the Ford-ideas, and that perhaps have never before been so persuasively stated as in this book.

Yet since Mr. Ford's book is not all doctrine, let me first pay tribute to the part which is not. The middle chapters of the book, such as "Changing Over an Industry," "Flexible Mass Production," "A Millionth of an Inch," give us rather full glimpses into the workings of the Ford plants. Here Mr. Ford appears as the honest mechanic—or factory manager—who has an all-consuming zeal for his work. Herein, who will say that Ford is not a genius—a genius who scraps overnight "the largest automobile plant in the world," in order to replace Model T with Model A; who founds rubber plantations in Brazil, against an evil day; who commands the services of the admirable Johansson, measurer of measurers, in order to gauge to the millionth of an inch the delicate operations upon which the quantity production of Ford cars must finally depend? One cannot but admire the gusto and the not immodest pride of this Henry Ford. Yes, even though one is obliged to reflect that the fruit of these stupendous operations is nothing more magnificent than a Ford car, buzzing along the highways and no doubt transporting quite as many fools as wise men. It is comforting, too, to have Mr. Ford's insistence that it is the excellence of the product which should come first in the manufacturer's mind—and not the disposal thereof, or the profit, which will result necessarily. Let us give Mr. Ford all the credit we can in the fields where he may speak with some authority. It is only as Mr. Ford may be taken as an oracle on other matters that he is dangerous—in fact, very dangerous indeed, and subversive of the better part of life as I conceive it.

In the first place, Mr. Ford sees the world as a gigantic Ford factory, or as some kind of factory, in which people manufacture Ford cars, or other articles, for the sole reason of getting the money to buy the articles that they manufacture. This is a very pinched and narrow view of life to begin with. It leaves out the vastly interesting departments of human life that can hardly ever be expected to submit themselves to a factory regime. Of that life and of professional life, of politics and government, of house-keeping, lovemaking, motherhood, fatherhood, literature, history (to say nothing of philosophy and religion and such pleasant trivialities as conversation and good digestion), Henry Ford takes no account. And we may presume, from his childish comments on Prohibition and his naive views of leisure, that he has no thoughts on these various subjects and no valid information about them.

If Mr. Ford's book were merely a book on economics or on methods of manufacture, I would not raise this point at all. But his theories of manufacture are all tied up with his views of life, which have the simplicity of fanaticism. Furthermore, Mr. Ford has the impertinence to suggest, at least implicitly, that we had better give up our shabby ideas of life and adopt his glittering ones; and he ludicrously puts himself forward as a missionary to Europe, who is now prepared to confer on little agricultural Denmark and disturbed England and stable France the questionable benefits of a Ford regime.

Let me now examine rather hastily some of the principal Ford-ideas.

Of the greatest importance, perhaps, is his distinction between "labor-saving and labor-serving" as applied to machines. Mr. Ford thinks that we are nowhere near the end of our ingenuity in devising machines that will substitute machine work for human work. There will be more and more machines, always more efficient ones, which will be manned by skilled technicians and made by even more skilled technicians, so that unskilled labor will eventually be quite unwanted. That this development of machines will therefore displace workers even Mr. Ford is obliged to concede; but he holds that the displaced workers (now known as the "technologically unemployed") will be taken care of by the new industries that must continuously arise, to meet the eternal new demands for new products.

Meanwhile, the skilled laborers who are retained in the factory have their tasks made physically easier; that is the meaning of "labor-serving." Their hours are short, and their pay is high—in 20 years it may reach $27 a day. They are given more leisure, which they are supposed to use in consuming the surplus products ingeniously devised for them; and for this purpose, too, they are paid high wages. And all of this must go on forever, more and more, with no limit at all in sight.

Now this is all very clever, and one cannot deny that, to some extent, the scheme has worked for Henry Ford, who has profited not only by his own genius but by the circumstances of a war-fattened, expansive period distinctly favorable to his independent experiments.

But there are serious implications behind these ideas.

What is the result for the laborer? The "labor-serving" idea is a mere quibble. Actually, Henry Ford's machines are labor-saving. This means that they are operated under the theory that labor is bad and men ought to do as little of it as possible. It implies that enjoyment is not connected with labor but must be pursued apart from it. One can only conclude that the introduction of more and more labor-saving machines signifies that labor will be held in more and more contempt. Or, still worse, that our lives are to be severely split between work and play, when as a matter of fact the two ought not to be put into opposition. In the ideal life work and play are not at odds, but harmoniously blend and interchange. God save us from the day when we may become convinced that work is an evil.

What is the result for the laborer who is thrown out of a job by the newly created machine? Mr. Ford passes lightly over this feature, in the face of a "technological unemployment" that is now giving thoughtful persons the gravest concern. Presumably, the laborer may get into some other industry, also newly created. Again, he may not. The prospect is one of fairly continuous unemployment, of both skilled and unskilled hordes milling painfully around our industrial centers. That this is already the case we know very well. And such a sharp and distressing study of unemployment as Clinch Calkins's Some Folks Won't Work is in severe contradiction to Mr. Ford's glib assurance.

What is the effect on industry itself? It is one of continual disadjustment and change. The manufacturer must always be scrapping his old plant and building a new one. He must put away his old machines and install better ones. This, says Mr. Ford, must be the normal procedure. There must be eternal experiment, eternal change. And what does this mean but a condition of furious uncertainty and instability, with the industrial structure always in a rickety and perilous shape?

And what, above all, is the effect on the consumers—the largest class of all, including not only laborers and capitalists, but all the immense public not engaged in factory production?

Under the Ford economy, it will be their duty to be even more thriftless than they are at present. They must spend and spend unceasingly, in order to consume the never-ending stream of new products that industry hurls upon them. They will be encouraged to make a necessity of every luxury that the clever industrialists may devise. For industry of the Ford type has no regard for actual and fundamental needs! It seeks to create two or even twenty demands where none at all existed before.

The result of all this, almost inevitably, will not only be a terrifying expansion of the abstract money economy, now already puzzling in its weird ramifications. It will be to corrupt the public life, throughout its entire body, by persuading people to believe that life is made up of material satisfactions only, and that there are no satisfactions that cannot be purchased. On the one hand, we shall have financial chaos; on the other, a degraded citizenry, who have been taught under the inhumane principles of Fordism always to spend more than they have, and to want more than they get.

Mr. Ford means well, of course. So did old John Brown of Osawatomie, when he proposed to arm the Negro slaves with pikes and guns. But Mr. Ford (who has exactly the John Brown type of mind, applied to mechanics and money) is more dangerous than John Brown, for he proposes to disrupt a whole nation by offering to its citizens precisely the same temptation that Satan offered Christ.