SOURCE: The American Earthquake, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958, pp. 214-48.

[Wilson was one of the foremost literary critics in the United States. A prolific writer who also produced poetry, plays, novels, journalistic nonfiction, and historical studies, Wilson was at all times concerned with the social reality that gives human actions, and the products of human actions, context and meaning. In the following essay, originally published in 1931, he presents a portrait of life in the auto industry, examining the reality against the various myths of Ford legend.]

On the dreary yellow Michigan waste with its gray stains of frozen water, the old cars wait like horses at the pound. Since the spring before last, Henry Ford has been buying them up at twenty dollars apiece, and people drive them in every day. Old, battered, muddy roadsters, sedans, limousines, touring cars and trucks—in strings of two or three they are dragged off to the disassembly building, following foolishly and gruesomely like corpses shaken up into life, hoods rickety and wheels turning backwards. Once inside, they are systematically and energetically dismantled: the flat road-ruined tires are stripped away; the rush-flare of an acetylene torch attacks the stems of the steering wheels; the motors are cleaned out like a bull's tripes and sent to make scrap iron for the blast furnace; the glass is taken out and kept to replace broken factory panes; the leather from the hoods and seats goes for aprons and handpads for the workers; the hair stuffing of the seats is sold again; even the bronze and babbitt metal are scraped out of the connecting rods and melted up to line new connecting rods. Then the picked and gutted carcass of the old car is shoved into a final death chamber—crushed flat by a five-ton press, which makes it scrunch like a stepped-on beetle.

The home of the open-hearth furnaces is a vast loud abode of giants: groans, a continual ringing, the falling of remote loads. The old automobiles sent in on little cars are like disemboweled horses at the bull-ring whose legs are buckling under them. A fiend in blue glasses who sits in a high throne on an enormous blue chariot or float causes it to move horizontally back and forth before the white-glowing mouths of the furnaces, feeding them the flattened cars like so many metallic soft-shell crabs—ramming each one in with a sudden charge, dropping it quickly with a twist. There are not many mouths big enough yet to accommodate a whole car at one gape, and, pending the completion of ten hundred-ton furnaces specially designed for the consumption of old cars—fifty thousand of which have been melted up since the April before last—they are being chopped up for the small-mouthed furnaces by a thousand-ton electric shear, which reduces chassis, springs, wheels, fenders and all to a junk-fodder of iron spines and bent tin shells, like horse-shoe crabs cut up for pigs. When you put on blue glasses and gaze through the blinding hole in the furnace door, where the old cars are being digested with such condiments as limestone and pig iron, you see only a livid lake which vibrates with pale thickish bubbles. (The draft from the furnace heats a boiler—the boiler produces steam—the steam runs a turbine—the turbine turns the fan that makes the draft.)

Twice a day the old liquefied cars are poured out through the backside of the furnace into receptacles like huge iron buckets: a hot stink, a thunderous hissing, the voiding of a molten feces of gold burned beyond gold to a white ethereal yellow, a supreme incandescence, while a spray of snow-crystal sparks explodes like tiny rockets. In the arena below the gallery, during the pouring no human beings go. Giant cranes move along the ceiling and, picking up the caldrons of golden soup, lift them across the great barn and tip them into other vats, whence the liquid runs down through holes into cylindrical ingot molds. Eleven hundred tons of steel a day.

In the blooming mill's spacious gloom, ruby lights are sharp tiny watch gems under the clockwork of thin naked steel beams and the writhing of vermiform silver pipes. Hot breaths; a prolonged dull hooting; the acridity of pickling baths. A crane like a gigantic blue airplane comes sliding along the ceiling and from an elaborate suspended cab, which slides at right angles to the movement of the crane, it lifts, with great beetle-tweezers, the dark cooling ingots out of their molds, carries them across and lowers them into ovens—the soaking pits—where they soak in heat till, white-hot, they glow.

Silver pipes—a deafening clack-a-clack-clack—the spilling of metallic avalanches—the groaning barks of Cerbera in labor. Transmitters like the shells of red monstrous snails, fattened behind glass in white and spotless stalls, furnish underground power for the rollers. You look down from a narrow gallery at a runway of turning cylinders: the ingot, now cooling red-hot, lurches along it like a length of column roughly blunt-snouted and grooved. As it enters a mechanical grotto, the rollers above and below it crunch off the outer crust and a shear crops the bottom end, in which the impurities have settled, and drops it into a waiting receptacle from which it will be routed back to be melted up again.

Now the pigs have been bloomed into billets and are heated to be rolled in the rolling mill. Long strips of redhot metal timber traveling along the rollers of the slides—squeezed out thinner and thinner, as they pass through the rollers of the stands, into longer and longer red worms, which a row of men, snapping the handles of black boxes in an upper gallery, cause to coast backwards and forwards or send spinning as they leave the wringers. Squared and cut in even lengths, they make at last a hangarful of piled steel stock.

Drop forges: a shattering whack-whack-whack, which, when, formerly, it whacked out crankshafts, could break down the mud-flat land and shake down the very building. But the crankshafts are now made at Highland Park. Here at Dearborn the big blacksmiths with bunged-up eyes, are stamping out connecting rods. By the steady steam-blown outflare of furnaces, with deliberate implacable bangs, the impacts of the dropping black trap, on anvil-die they bring hammer-die down, and out of red-hot lengths of tongs-held stock they cut cupcake-pans that still glow red-hot.

Machining: a finished connecting rod is the product of twenty-eight different processes. .The rake-forks of the chain conveyor wind zigzag in and out among benches and carry the connecting rods from one machine to the next. Each one of them must be toughened by a print heat-treat and softened by a draw heat-treat; rolled in a revolving tumbler, which rubs the scale away and turns the metal from dull to shining; straightened in s wedge presses; drilled on revolving turrets; rough-turned, finish-turned, chamfered and threaded; bored with holes for the crankshaft and wristpin; the holes lined with white babbitt metal and bronze, the babbitt and bronze burnished smooth as satin; cleaned, oxidized, trimmed, washed, oil-holes drilled and oil-pocket cut (a solid man in a brown suit and round glasses has just invented a new machine for drilling all the holes at once, and he is supervising its installation); oil-groove cut, oil-pocket broached; balanced on a scale and corrected—the ones that weigh too much or too little scrapped in thick-lipped iron buckets; holes in the babbitt and bronze bored with a diamond drill; inspected in constant-temperature greenhouses, lit blank violet by mercury tubes, and gauged to a millionth of an inch by a gauge with a diamond point.

The part—the connecting rod—is now done with the production conveyor, and starts on another journey, along the subassembly conveyor, in the course of which other parts are added. The wristpins are now stuck in; the crankshaft and the piston are fitted. The rod is important, it must be a sound part: it has to withstand the wear and tear of a hundred revolutions a minute. At last it is fixed in the motor-block. The motor-block goes on its way and, piece by piece, becomes fully equipped; it acquires a queer little muzzle and two protruding eyes—takes on an animal aspect; and it finally crawls up the conveyor track on its way to the assembly room like an obedient tropical beetle.

In this assembly room, to the pointblank banging of hammers, the motor-block is seized and dropped down into an empty still wheelless frame which, on a double-track conveyor, is passing beneath to receive it; and now there takes shape on this track a kind of ichthyosaurus-shape that moves slowly with sprawling paws and a single long knobbed snail-eye which one recognizes soon as a gear-shaft. This shape, as it moves along, picks up wheels, shiny fenders, shiny runningboards. From above, the familiar body is dropped down on the goggle-eyed frame: the thing is a motor car now, glossy and fit to go, but still passive, still moved by another agency as if it had not yet emerged from the womb. Now it gets its last tests and touches: horns are made to speak, windshield cleaners wiped around their arc, accidental scratches painted over. Black coupés; blue town sedans; maroon tudors; buff roadsters; green trucks—they leave the conveyor for good; are pushed out, self-possessed and gleaming, with their glass goggle eyes just opened, into their first electric-lighted showroom. They stand waiting to be driven away or to be taken to the dealers on trailers, over the long dreary Michigan waste.

"It's not human—I could just bust when I talk about it—break the spirit of an elephant, it 'ud. I'd starve before I'd go back! They don't give ye no warnin'. Pick up your tools and get a clearance, the boss says—then they inspect your toolbox to see you're not takin' any of the company's tools—then ye report to the employment office with your time card and they give ye a clearance that says they 'cahn't use ye to further advahntage'—then ye're done. I've been laid off since last July. Sometimes they leave ye your badge, and then ye can't get a job anywhere else, because if ye try to, they call up Ford's and they tell 'em ye're still on the payroll, though ye're not workin' and not gettin' a cent. Then they can say they've still got so many men on the payroll. He's a wonder at the publicity, is Ford.

"In England they do things more leisurely-like. I was an auto and tool worker in Manchester from fourteen years old. I got six shillin's a week for seven years—till the War, then I went into the Royal Air Force—but I failed in the nerve test—I was a second-clahss air mechanic durin' the War. An ahnt of mine had been in the States and had seen the pawssibilities, and when she came back, she said, 'Bert, you're wastin' your time!'—so I came over in September, '23. They're ridin' for a fall in England—they've got their back to the wall—the vital industries are bein' bled away from 'em, and they cahn't do away with the dole, but if they stop it, they've got to face the music. There's young chaps there that have grown up on the dole, and now you cahn't make 'em work—when they're given a job they get fired on purpose. The government's between the devil and the deep sea. Take the bread away from the animals and they'll bite. The way they do things in England, it's a miracle how they ever come through!

"When I first came over, I worked at Fisher Bodies for three months. I took a three-shift job on production at the start rather than be walkin' around. But then I went to Ford's—like everybody else, I'd 'eard about Ford's wages. And you do get the wages. I got $5 a day for the first two months and $6 ahfter, for a year or so—then I ahsked for a raise and got forty cents more a day for two and a hahlf years—I never saw this $7 a day. But the wages are the only redeemin' feature. If he cut wages, they'd walk out on 'im. Ye get the wages, but ye sell your soul at Ford's—ye're worked like a slave all day, and when ye get out ye're too tired to do anything—ye go to sleep on the car comin' home. But as it is, once a Ford worker, always a Ford worker. Ye get lackadaisical, as they say in Lancashire—ye haven't got the guts to go. There's people who come to Ford's from the country, thinkin' they're goin' to make a little money—that they'll only work there a few years and then go back and be independent. And then they stay there forever—unless they get laid off. Ye've never got any security in your job. Finally they moved us out to the Rouge—we were the first people down there—we pioneered there when the machinery wasn't hardly nailed down. But when they began gettin' ready for Model A, production shut down and we were out of a job. I'd tried to get transferred, but they laid me off. Then I 'eard they were wantin' some die-makers—I'd never worked at die-makin', but I said I'd 'ad five years at it and got a job, and I was in that department three years till I got laid off last July. I ahsked to be transferred and they laid me off. They'll lay ye off now for any reason or no reason.

"It's worse than the army, I tell ye—ye're badgered and victimized all the time. You get wise to the army after a while, but at Ford's ye never know where ye're at. One day ye can go down the aisle and the next day they'll tell ye to get the hell out of it. In one department, they'll ahsk ye why the hell ye haven't got gloves on and in another why the hell ye're wearin' them. If ye're wearin' a clean apron, they'll throw oil on it, and if a machinist takes pride in 'is tools, they'll throw 'em on the floor while he's out. The bosses are thick as treacle and they're always on your neck, because the man above is on their neck and Sorenson's on the neck of the whole lot—he's the man that pours the boiling oil down that old Henry makes. There's a man born a hundred years too late, a regular slave driver—the men tremble when they see Sorenson comin'. He used to be very brutal—he'd come through and slug the men. One day when they were movin' the plant he came through and found a man sittin' workin' on a box. 'Get up!' says Sorenson. 'Don't ye know ye can't sit down in here?' The man never moved and Sorenson kicked the box out from under 'im—and the man got up and bashed Sorenson one in the jaw. 'Go to hell!' he says. 'I don't work here—I'm workin' for the Edison Company!'

"Then ye only get fifteen minutes for lunch. The lunch wagon comes around—the ptomaine wagon, we call it. Ye pay fifteen cents for a damn big pile o' sawdust. And they let you buy some wonderful water that hasn't seen milk for a month. Sorenson owns stock in one of the lunch companies, I'm told. A man's food is in 'is neck when he starts workin'—it 'asn't got time to reach 'is stomach.

"A man checks 'is brains and 'is freedom at the door when he goes to work at Ford's. Some of those wops with their feet wet and no soles to their shoes are glad to get under a dry roof—but not for me! I'm tryin' to forget about it—it even makes me sick now every time I get on a car goin' west!"

This Englishman, whose name is Bert, lives with a man named Hendrickson, an American, who works for the Edison Company. Hendrickson gets thirty-five dollars a week for finding out what is wrong with dynamos and other machinery that doesn't work, but his interest in electricity does not stop with putting them back into running order. He has fitted up a little laboratory and study in the house where Bert and he board—hardly more than a narrow closet off the sitting-room, but with space enough for a blackboard, on which Hendrickson can chalk up his problems; a considerable technical library, including Whitehead's Introduction to Mathematics, and one work of pure literature, Montaigne's Essays; blueprints of Detroit transformers: intricate structures of long taut lines—here and there threading series of blocks or clusters of truncated carets—of an abstraction almost mathematical and with the beauty of mathematical diagrams; a little washcloset turned into a dark room, in which he is able to make these blueprints for a third of what he would have to pay a photographer; a pile of original papers dealing with various problems, neatly bound up in blue folders; and photographs of Tesla and Steinmetz.

Hendrickson is a great admirer of Steinmetz. He has two photographs of him and thinks one of them particularly good. He explains that it was hard to get a picture of him on account of his being a humpback—he wouldn't be able to get into the country if he was to come over now, he adds. Hendrickson never actually saw Steinmetz, but he can tell you about the way he used to lecture almost as if he had heard him. Steinmetz used to talk without notes and unless he was stopped, would go on forever, but he was always so interested in what he was saying and made everything so clear to his hearers that he carried them all along with him and you were willing to keep on listening as long as he talked. Bert declares that Hendrickson has the same gift.

In the next room, with its gray mottled wallpaper, its little prayer-meeting organ and its picture of Queen Victoria, the lady of the house, somewhat blowzy, is dozing among sheets of the Sunday paper, while her black-and-tan mongrel puppy disports itself on the carpet with a toilet-paper roll and a bone.

Bert has, in general, a great opinion of Hendrickson's abilities and feels that he is being exploited by his superiors. He claims that the experts of the Edison Company get the credit for learned scientific papers for which Hendrickson has furnished the material. In every organization, says Bert, one man owns the cart and another rides in it. But this doesn't seem to worry Hendrickson—he has no quarrel with the Edison Company. On the contrary, he takes a personal pride in the fact that Detroit can boast that it has more twenty-five-thousand-volt underground cables than any other city in the country. His face is permanently pocked and scarred with acid that was spilled on it some years ago, but this accident does not appear to have had any psychological effect on him. He is unceasingly preoccupied with the problems of electricity, and when for a few moments he has time on his hands, he sits down, no matter where he is, and immediately goes sound asleep.

It is plain that the British Bert is a maladjusted man not at home in America, unhappy between the middle and the working class; but Hendrickson seems to inhabit a world that is homogeneous, in which classes do not exist because everybody in it is consecrated to the progress of electricity.

Hendrickson is short on the practical side, and Bert on the theoretical. Hendrickson can figure anything out and provide the mathematics, but Bert has to build it for him.

"I wouldn't mind having my job at L—back—I quit last November to get married.

"First I worked at R—; that's the worst place o f all to work. The presses are awfully close together, and there are no stools, you have to stand. There's an awful ringing in your ears from the noise of the presses, but I used to hum tunes, to the rhythm—I used to hum the Miserere.

"But I didn't stay there long—I got a job at L—, which is a much better place to work. They made interior parts—ash-receivers and dome-light rims and escutcheons—those are the little brass plates behind the door-knob that holds it in. You have a strip of brass and run it through the press—you step on a pedal, and the die comes down and cuts it out. We were working with small No. 4 presses and we were supposed to turn out 1,624 pieces an hour. Most of the girls couldn't make it, and if they couldn't enough times, they'd get their base rate lowered.

"For instance, if you were a dome-rim-maker, say, and couldn't do 512 pieces an hour, you'd be cut from thirtytwo to twenty-eight cents. If you made a misstep on the pedal, you were liable to lose a finger—I always had some kind of a cut. When an accident happens nobody ever tells about it, and sometimes you don't know definitely till a week later—but I could always tell if something had happened as soon as I came into the room: the place always seems very clean and everybody's very quiet. Once when I was there, a girl lost her finger and gave a terrible shriek—and another time when the same thing happened to another girl, she just put a rag around her hand and quietly walked out. One day a girl got two fingers cut off, and they sent everybody home. A man in the hinge department lost three fingers once the same week. People often don't make use of the safety devices because they can work faster without them. Then your chest would get cut up from the trimmings—mine was all red. And the oil gives you an itch—your arms get itchy and you just about go crazy—they gave you some white stuff to put on it, but it didn't do any good.

"But I got so I had a certain amount of skill—I used to take satisfaction in turning out so many pieces a day, and I got to be known as a fast worker. I liked it better than the telegraph company. I liked the girls at L—much better than the telegraph girls; the telegraph girls are always talking about the men who are going to take them out and how much money they spend on them. The girls at L—were mostly married, and you could have a much better time with them. The telegraph girls are thin and nervous as a rule. They're always breaking down. The turnover is terribly high—it's supposed to be 100 per cent every three years. The machine that you punch out the messages on is speeded up to sixty words a minute—3,600 words an hour. No stenographer has to work that fast. And you've got the supervisor over you all the time. You have to join the company union—if you refuse, you're fired. Ever since the telephone and telegraph strike, the company has been scared of the C.T.U.

"I only make $75 a month now—less than at L—: I never earned less than $40 for two weeks when I was there. And they're going to put in eighty-word-a-minute machines now, it seems—they've got them in Chicago already. When we get them here, I'm going to quit.

"There was a freedom at L—; you could g o i n a gingham dress. And I could bully the foreman and everybody. At the telegraph company, the supervisors aren't supposed to fraternize with the girls. And I enjoyed wearing a clean cap on Fridays—on Fridays we all wore a clean cap, and I used to get a kick out of it."

Fred Vogel is a man of fifty, who started in at twelve selling papers in New York, but has spent most of his mature life working in the Detroit motor factories. He was a superintendent for many years, but finding himself forced, at Briggs Bodies, to spend thirteen and a half hours a day at the plant with only about two hours' work, he has "shaved off his Simon Legrees," as he says, and taken a janitor's job.

Since then he has been attempting to organize an auto workers' union in a city where the manufacturers have in the past made organization impossible. He has spoken his mind about this in the following declaration:

"In recent statements handed to the press by several of the industrial Barons, that they were not going to reduce wages, they are rather vague as to what they are actually doing here in Dynamic Detroit, as it is termed throughout the United States.

"Here is a review of the true conditions. Mind you, gentle reader, these are not prehistoric figures, although I will grant you that they have a primitive color, but the writer stood in line three days in July to get a job. After I had passed the employment manager, I was passed on to the medical examiner, I was ushered into a small booth and told to strip, then entered another office in the nude, was weighed, eyes examined, and answered a few questions, and was then told to go to work.

"I started to work under the group piece-work system. For those of you that have never worked under this system, I will offer a brief outline of its workings. The individual worker loses his identification and becomes a part of a group. We will say anywhere from five to fifty or more are placed in these groups. The group that I was working in had twenty-six. There was nine different operations in the group. The completed part paid $1.09. The operation that I was working on paid 350 and the men would do from three to four every hour—it all depended on how fast the conveyor was running. Every operator took his turn if he was able, if not the group had to carry them along. The operation that I was on priced as bad as the rest, and when other operators would complain they were told not to worry, that they would make just as much as the rest, because the other operations would carry them through.

"How would you like to make from $1.05 to $1.40 per hour and be paid off anywhere from thirty-one cents to seventy-four cents per hour? Sometimes they will send an extra man in your group or loan a few men to another group and in that way it was hard to keep a record of production or hours. They used to keep a production sheet where one could glance at it, but not now. We could figure it out and know just what we were supposed to draw on pay day. Our day rate was seventy cents per hour, but that made no difference, if you complained, you were laid off, take it or leave it. We were told when they adopted this system that it was a much simpler method of keeping labor and production records.

"Another hijacking scheme is the group bonus. This system of banditry varies a little. You are paid a base rate, we will say of fifty cents per hour, you have an operation that the time study department has allowed you, we will say, two hours for and you make it in one hour. You have made 100 per cent efficiency and that gives you an extra twenty-five cents per hour, providing the rest of the group that you are working with are as fast as you and can keep the pace. If not, you just lose and make what the group makes. The other twenty-five cents you make—well, I don't know just who gets that. This group system enables the employer to take inexperienced help and put them in a group, and they are trained to be skilled workers at no cost to the manufacturer. Their training is paid for out of the group they are working with, so it is up to the worker to break in the inexperienced help as soon as possible. It never pays to complain about prices, they retime it and chop some more off. And don't forget that sweepers and stockmen, also repairmen, are paid off of the group. Group leaders and gang bosses get their split off of you, so you can readily see why the employer is in favor of the group—less overhead and bigger dividends. They have also installed the budget system. The time study department sends a budget sheet every month telling just how many you can have in your department according to their way of figuring. Should they make a mistake and the foreman has to put on some extra help, that's unfortunate, but they still have the old reliable group to fall back on and it is taken out of them.

"How would you like to start work at seven and work until ten or ten-thirty and receive as your stipend for the day and a half, $3.70, and work 134 hours for a two weeks' pay and receive $74? Figure it for yourself. This is not common labor, it used to be a trade, but since the advent of massed or messed production as is in vogue at the present writing, trades have lost identification, you're just an operator or otherwise termed, a skilled laborer.

"Henry Ford is belching forth like a volcanic eruption telling the world that in 1950 the industrial slaves will be paid at the rate of $35 per day. Well, half of that would go mighty nice right now and it would help a lot in solving the economic situation that the world is going through. When you announced your $1.00 per day increase, Henry Ford, the higher-priced men were laid off and replaced with cheaper help, so if you are sincere and intend to give the workers a little of the sunlight and this scheme is not another of your tricks to hog the front pages of the newspapers throughout the world, why send some of your expert investigators over to the Murray Cor'p of America and see for yourself the slavery conditions that exist there, where humans are building the bodies for your cars, where polishers work all day Sunday, eight hours to be exact, and receive the glorious sum of sixty-two cents for a Sabbath of slavery. Other skilled operators in the trimming department started an operation at $1.40 and was cut 100 every week until they are doing the same work for 900 and making 600 per hour when they work.

"While the worker has been cut from 70 to 150 per cent on piece-work prices, the foremen have been reduced to hourly rates and in numerous cases have been told to look for work elsewhere, but dividends have not fallen off any. Dividends paid investors in leading American enterprises for the year 1930 aggregate at least $8,200,000,000, or 8.3 per cent greater than in 1929, according to reports gathered by the United States Department of Commerce. So you executives that have lost your position need not feel so bad, because these dividends just had to increase and you know the rest. When you scions of wealth are rolling along the boulevard lolling in the arms of luxury or maybe basking in the sunshine getting your winter coat of tan, just stop and think of the blood money that put you there. Some of the poor females that was crowded out due to price cutting are walking the streets offering their body for sale, so that they can get a meal and a night's lodging, not that they care for this life but it is a means of a livelihood."

"I came over from Glasgow in 1923, when I was sixteen—they pretty near had a revolution over there in 1919 after the War. My father had a barbershop—when he first came over here, he was out of work for three months—our sole piece of furniture was a trunk—we'd brought bedding from the old country. My father finally went to worruk as a check-strap-maker and got $8 a day. I went to high school—I won a couple of prizes while I was there. I was on the debating team, and I won a prize in an oratorical contest held by the Better America Federation—that's a bunch of patriots in Los Angeles. I was on the committee on the class-day program the year that I graduated and I had a tiff with one of the teachers: she said to me, 'James McRae, you'll either die on the gallows or become a Socialist!'

"Then I went to City College. In the meantime, I carried papers for the Free Press—then I checked accounts for a news company. I also worruked in a department store for $5 a week and as bookkeeper in a savings bank. One summer I worruked at Packard. I was assistant treasurer at college—but we had Weisbord and Scott Nearing come and speak under the auspices of the YMCA, and as a result they kicked us out of it. Then we forrumed a Liberal Club and became more neurotic and radical than before. We got out a paper and we asked an organizer of the Auto Worrukers' Union to speak before our club, and as a result of that our club was forbidden to meet in the college. We had three sessions with the Dean, and he finally threw us out of the office. He told me to shut up or get kicked out. We were very nervous and hysterical at that time. But then Forrest Bailey hearrud about it and wrote it up in the Scripps-Howard papers, and the Dean backed down and took me back as assistant treasurer.

"In the meantime, my father'd had an accident—he was blown up in a shack where he was worruking and the company fought the case. My mother tried to go to worruk at R—, but, what with the noise and the fear of losing a finger, she collapsed after two days. There are more accidents at R than anywhere else—they have no safety devices. They used to say R—supported the Checker cabs carrying people to the infirmary. Then the paint room blew up out there in the spring of '27—the paint wasn't properly stored. The papers said there were twenty-nine killed, but there were a couple of hundred actually—lots of them were foreign-born with families in the old country, and they just said nothing about them. You couldn't get into the hospital that day for stepping over bodies from the R blast.

"We lost our house because we couldn't keep up the payments—then the first big lay-off came, and they've been laying off ever since. I'd worruked at the Kelsey Wheel Company—I worruked twelve hours a night on the night shift and got $30 a week. I carried rims from one section to another section on the Chevrolet line. Then I got a job at Ford's as a pushrod-grinder at $5 a day—I was raised to $6 at the end of sixty days, and when the wage raise came in, I got seven bucks—but by that time we were only worruking two days a week, so I only got $14 a week. Finally I quit—I wanted to go to Brookwood Labor College. I didn't mind factory worruk in itself—for two or three hours it used to stimulate my mind. But eight or ten hours of it deadens you—you're too tired to do much when you're through.

"I was disappointed in Brookwood. Muste asked me to be a delegate to the Conference for Progressive Labor Action, but I didn't have much faith in progressivism. I expect nothing from students and middleclass movements. When I used to go around and make speeches, I found the college audiences the worst of all.

"When I left Ford's, I was idle for three weeks, then I got a job as adding-machine operator in a bank. I stuck on by hook or by crook, till I was laid off the other day. I was laid off while I was eating lunch—they said, 'here's your pink slip—you're a fine worruker and so forth, but we've got to cut down expenses.' Now I'm looking for worruk. I'd like to go to Russia and worruk in a factory over there, if I could raise the transportation. At one time, I thought I wanted to be a college instructor—but when I saw the colleges and the teachers and the restrictions they were under, I gave up the idea—I'd rather be free.

"What we want here is a revolutionary movement geared into the peculiar needs of the American worrukers, and I'll say quite frankly that if it isn't the Communist party, I don't see any other elements in the country who will supply it. The Communists have done a lot—they've practically stopped evictions. When there's an eviction about to take place, the people notify the Unemployed Council and the Communists go around and wait till the sheriff has gone and then move all the furniture back into the house. Then the landlord has to notify the authorities again, and the sheriff has to get a new warrant, and the result is that they usually never get around to evicting the people again. They've got the landlords so buffaloed that the other day a woman called up the Unemployed Council and asked whether she could put her tenants out yet. The Unemployed Council said no.

"The Communists led the Flint strike last summer. It started as a spontaneous walk-out by the trimmers and was taken up by the Auto Worrukers' Union, where the Communists were dominant. They were striking against a wage-cut of 33 per cent and certain foremen they didn't like and the speed-up and worruking conditions. The whole force of the state was mobilized against them. They broke up the strike meetings and the six leaders were taken out by dicks and beaten up in the woods. Finally they broke the strike by rounding up the leaders and locking them up—they couldn't get a lawyer in Hint to defend them. But the company took back the wage-cut and got rid of the foremen and granted their other demands. The union was wiped out, however. The Auto Worruks' News, that had a circulation of twenty thousand, went out of existence after the strike.

"It's a weakness of the Communists just at present that they don't talk the language of the American worruker. Take the leaflets they pass out at these demonstrations—they're all stereotyped radical phrases. Your American worruker wants something concrete. I could wish, too, that they had more interest here in the discussion of their ideas. I went around one day with a book by Plekhanov on the philosophical problems of Marxism, a very illuminating book—but they wouldn't take any interest in it.

"There's a small IWW group, too—I went around there and tried to see them, but they're so suspicious that you can't get to them at all.

"What we need are democratic orrgans of education to educate the worrukers along Marxist lines."

Detroit is a simple homogeneous organism which has expanded to enormous size. The protoplasmic cells of Detroit are the same as fifteen years ago: drab yellow or red brick houses, sometimes with black rock-candy columns or a dash of crass Romanesque; tight, dreary, old, long-windowed mansions with fancy cupolas and jigsaw woodwork; little dull one-story frame houses of the Polak and Negro sections; apartment buildings, libraries and churches with gray wrinkled reptilian limestone skins which make them look like prisons; obsolete brick garages and machine shops like the one in which Henry Ford worked on his first gas car.

All this, in the gray cold light and the slush of a February thaw—trimmed with the red ribbon-script and the blue borders of Neon signs that advertize brake service, Hudsons, Fords, candy and real estate—looks just as prosaic and provincial as it did fifteen years ago. But today the unattractive houses have spread on the flat lands, and they are dominated by other monuments. One remembers the Statler Hotel, the Penobscot office building, the giant stove from the Chicago World's Fair, which looms suddenly on Jefferson Avenue, the majestic old water-works. But the success of the motor industry has taken shape today as a herd of towering constructions that culminates in the new Fisher Building. This building has a vast arcade with a modernistic lighting through angular glazed-glass leaves; a kind of German mythological ceiling, the gold paint alone for which is said to have cost $100,000; and a theater archaeologically decorated in the style of a Mayan temple, to which the baby-voiced Helen Kane has this week brought her boop-boop-adoop. The Fisher Building at night is illuminated with soda-fountain colors: orange above and peach below. There is also a new spectacular Masonic Temple, halfway between a palatial apartment house and a second-rate modern cathedral. And the streets, of course, are crawling with cars—can there ever have been so many in a city of comparable size? They are circulating around the boulevard with the swiftness and consistency of electric current, and they pack open spaces and side streets in regular long parked rows.

And yet, as a result of the depression, this flood of cars, it seems, has shrunk. In order to encourage carowners not to get rid of their cars, the city, which cannot afford to have its gas stations go broke, is letting licenses run over till March so that they do not need to take out new ones. But so many, nevertheless, are selling them that secondhand cars are now being shipped away to keep prices from dropping to nothing.

In the region around Highland Park, which was left flat by Ford when he moved out to Dearborn, the houses and the stores are For Rent, For Rent, For Rent. Many of the automobile plants are working only three or four days a week, and some have closed down altogether. There have been universal lay-offs and wage-cutting. Metal-finishers, for example, the highest grade of skilled labor, who were formerly paid $1.10 an hour, get in some cases 15 cents now. The white-collar class are losing their jobs as well as the factory workers: there are probably as many as 66 per cent of the population either entirely or partly out of work, and 45,000 families dependent on the city Welfare Department. The banks have been amalgamating and failing till there are comparatively few left: thousands have lost all their savings. The employment agencies and soup kitchens are crowded, and people without jobs gloomily make their way from one factory gate to another in the hope that somebody may be hiring again.

The employers are gloomy, too—it is beginning to be generally confessed that the normal demand for American cars could be quite satisfactorily supplied with perhaps half the present plant. The huge organism of Detroit, for all its Middle Western vigor, is clogged with dead tissue now. You can see here, as it is impossible to do in a more varied and complex city, the whole structure of an industrial society; almost everybody who lives in Detroit is dependent on the motor industry and in more or less obvious relation to everybody else who lives here. When the industry is crippled, everybody is hit. "The cylinder-head has cracked!" says one official of a large motor company, "and when the cylinder-head is cracked, you have to get a new car. The system has broken down!" But the minds of motor company officials have not as yet been fertile in ideas for new systems.

As for Henry Ford himself, his reputation as a benefactor of the American workingman has conspicuously declined.

His removal of his factories to Dearborn outside the city limits, in order to escape city taxes, has relieved him from contributing anything to the relief of the unemployed, a third of whom, according to the city's calculations, have been laid off from his own plant. Yet Ford is still the great personality, his career is the myth, as it were, on which the city is founded; and if one wants to understand Detroit, one must try to get at the realities that are partly concealed by this myth. Henry Ford, who has a great eye for publicity, has now been presented to the world through several official biographies, a so-called autobiography and several volumes of pronunciamentos written by Samuel Crowther. His legend has gone all over the world; he is one of the most famous Americans and one of the most favorably known, and has been, at one time or another, compared to Abraham Lincoln, Jesus Christ and Karl Marx (for this last analogy, see the March Atlantic Monthly). It has occasionally happened, however, that some one who has been in a position to study Henry Ford at close range, exasperated or worried by this legend, has attempted to reveal what he is really like. This was the case with the Reverend Samuel S. Marquis, who published in 1923 a book called Henry Ford: An Interpretation. Doctor Marquis had been Ford's pastor and afterwards ran his Welfare Department. It was also the case with Mr. E. G. Pipp, the original editor of the Dearborn Independent and the author of Henry Ford: Both Sides of Him. Even Mr. Allan L. Benson, the writer of one of the official biographies, The New Henry Ford, felt obliged, at the time when the Ford presidential boom was being got under way, to add to it a further chapter, unapproved by his subject, which warned people against taking Ford seriously as a candidate for the presidency. And this winter another former employee, Mr. W. M. Cunningham of the Ford publicity department, has published the harshest indictment of all, "J 8," A Chronicle of the Neglected Truth about Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Co., which Ford's has been doing its best to suppress, as it suppressed Dr. Marquis's book. Most valuable, perhaps, of all because more detached and intelligent is Mr. Louis P. Lochner's book on the Peace Ship: Henry Ford—America's Don Quixote.

These books all agree in the main, and what one hears in Detroit confirms them. The account that follows here is an attempt to put a portrait together out of the testimony of a variety of witnesses—businessmen, newspapermen, Ford office men and Ford workers as well as the authors of the above-mentioned books.

Henry Ford is, of course, a remarkable man: he is a mechanical and industrial genius. It is true that he has made few important inventions, that he has usually been a mere exploiter of principles discovered by other people; yet the boy who ran away at night against his father's orders and swam across a creek in order to fix the engine of a neighbor's threshing machine, whose hands, he says, "just itched to get hold of the throttle," who repaired his first watch with an old nail sharpened on a grindstone, who built a "farm locomotive" before he was twenty by mounting a steam engine on mowing-machine wheels— this boy exhibited already the capacity for concentration and the instinctive affinity for a medium by which one recognizes the vocation of a master. From the improvised screwdriver and the farm locomotive, Henry Ford, in spite of formidable difficulties, has gone straight to the River Rouge plant, with all its sources of raw material and its auxiliaries, that self-sufficing industrial cosmos, a masterpiece of ingenuity and efficiency. Few people in any field are capable of following their line with the intense singlemindedness of Ford; few people have a passion for their work of a kind that so completely shuts out other interests. ("I don't like to read books," says Ford. "They muss up my mind.") And it is a passion that has bred no ambition to do anything but satisfy itself. There is no evidence that Henry Ford has ever cared much about money. He has not applied himself systematically to acquiring a fortune for pleasure or show: his financial sense has been developed under the pressure of meeting emergencies. He needs money to expand his plant, and figuring in terms of the last fraction of a cent he has found to be one of the rules of the game he has set himself. This game is the direct expression of Henry Ford's personal character: to make cars which, though as homely as he is, shall be at once the cheapest, the most energetic and the most indestructible possible. When in 1921 the bankers almost had Ford on his back, he checkmated them by the unexpected and quite non-professional financial move of unloading all his stock on the dealers and making them pay him by borrowing from the banks (thus inaugurating, according to some, the era of high-pressure salesmanship).

Nor is there evidence that, except for a brief period, Henry Ford has ever cared very much about the welfare of the people who work for him. His immunity to social ambitions and to the luxuries of the rich has evidently been the result rather of an obstinate will to assert himself for what he is than of a feeling of solidarity with the common man. It has already been too difficult for Henry Ford to survive and to produce the Ford car and the River Rouge plant for him to worry about making things easy for other people, who, whatever disadvantages they may start with, can get along very well, he is certain, if they really have the stuff in them as he did. Has he not helped to create a new industry and made himself one of its masters—a boy from a Western farm, with no education or training, and in the teeth of general ridicule, merciless competition and diabolical conspiracies of bankers? Let others work as hard as he has. What right have the men in his factories to complain of the short eight hours that they are paid good money to spend there?

Yet to take good care of one's workers is a policy that saves money and that safeguards against rebellions, and a reputation for being humane is also good advertizing. In the volume called My Life and Work, Ford allows Samuel Crowther to write for him the following account of the establishment, at the beginning of 1914, of the eight-hour day, the six-day week and the five-dollar minimum wage. "It was to our way of thinking an act of social justice, and in the last analysis we did it for our own satisfaction of mind. There is a pleasure in feeling that you have made others happy—that you have lessened in some degree the burdens of your fellow men—that you have provided a margin out of which may be had pleasure and saving. Good will is one of the few really important assets of life. A determined man can will almost anything that he goes after, but unless, in his getting, he gains good will he has not profited much."

Here, however, is Mr. Pipp's account: "I … have heard of disputes as to who was responsible for the five-dollar wage. I have put the question directly to Ford, who said he worked many a night on it and concluded that machinery was playing such an important part in production that if men could be induced to speed up the machinery, there would be more profit at the high wage than at the low wage. He figured out a plan of doubling the wage of the lowest paid men and others accordingly, the wage to apply after they had been with the company six months and complied with other conditions. As I recall the figures he gave me, they were $4.84 a day for the lowest paid man of six months' standing. He said he put the figures up to Couzens, who said: 'Why not make it a straight five-dollar wage and it will be the greatest advertizement an automobile ever had,' or words to that effect. Couzens didn't have to say it twice to Ford. When the information came out, it was real news for the public and of high advertising value to the company, from which Ford still benefits."

One does not need to doubt that for Ford certain genuinely benevolent emotions were released by the unusual direction which the profit motive had taken. With so much imagination for machinery, he is not without imagination for life. Here is a third explanation of the $5 minimum, as made by Ford to Dr. Marquis: "I asked him why he had fixed upon $5 as the minimum pay for unskilled labor. His reply was, 'Because that is about the least a man with a family can live on in these days. We have been looking into the housing and home conditions of our employees, and we find that the skilled man is able to provide for his family, not only the necessities, but some of the luxuries of life. He is able to educate his children, to rear them in a decent home in a desirable neighbor-hood. But with the unskilled man it is different. He's not getting enough. He isn't getting all that's coming to him. And we must not forget that he is just as necessary to industry as the skilled man. Take the sweeper out of the shop and it would become in a short time an unfit place in which to work. We can't get along without him. And we have no right to take advantage of him because he must sell his labor in an open market. We must not pay him a wage on which he cannot possibly maintain himself and his family under proper physical and moral conditions, just because he is not in a position to demand more.'

"But suppose the earnings of a business are so small that it cannot afford to pay that which, in your opinion, is a living wage; what then?' I asked.

'"Then there is something wrong with the man who is trying to run the business. He may be honest. He may mean to do the square thing. But clearly he isn't competent to conduct a business for himself, for a man who cannot make a business pay a living wage to his employees has no right to be in business. He should be working for someone who knows how to do things. On the other hand, a man who can pay a living wage and refuses to do so is simply storing up trouble for himself and others. By underpaying men we are bringing on a generation of children undernourished and underdeveloped, morally as well as physically: we are breeding a generation of workingmen weak in body and in mind, and for that reason bound to prove inefficient when they come to take their places in industry. Industry will, therefore, pay the bill in the end. In my opinion it is better to pay as we go along and save the interest on the bill, to say nothing of being human in our industrial relations. For this reason we have arranged to distribute a fair portion of the profits of the company in such a way that the bulk of them will go to the man who needs them most.'"

But what actually happened was that, in spite of these benevolent intentions, between 1914 and 1927 the cost of living nearly doubled in Detroit, and although in 1919 Ford raised his minimum rate to $6, his workers were actually less well off getting $30 a week than they had been before the $5 minimum was established. In December, 1929, the rate was raised to $7. Ford announced this latter event, in a spectacular manner, at the White House, before an industrial conference called by Hoover after the first stock-market crash, and it produced the usual effect of reinforcing his reputation for boldness and generosity. Yet Ford was not only giving much less employment, he was distributing much less money than formerly, and he was saving on production. In 1925, he had been employing 200,000 men at $6, an aggregate of $300,000,000, but by the fall of 1929, there were only about 145,000 men working at Ford's, who at $7 a day would get an aggregate of only $253,750,000. By December, 1929, then, when Ford was turning out more motorcars, he was employing many fewer men. This was due partly to the technological innovations which have been throwing people out of work ever since the Nottingham weavers broke their mechanical looms; but it meant also that the men still employed were considerably speeded up and that the fat bait of $7 a day made it possible for the manufacturer to recruit the quickest and most vigorous workers at the expense of the less able ones. Since the fall of 1929, the number of men employed at Ford's has shrunk from 145,000 to something like 25,000, and at the present time the plant is shut down for all but the first three days of the week.

In 1914, Henry Ford—still associated at that time with James Couzens, who later felt himself obliged to resign and has since become the liberal senator from Michigan—established a welfare department and brought in Dr. Marquis to run it. The Ford plant was decorated with placards reading "Help the Other Fellow," and, though Ford is implacably opposed to old age pensions, a special attempt was made to provide work for old men and cripples. At this time, also, Mr. E. G. Pipp received donations from Ford to help him take care of the situation created by the flooding into Detroit of workers attracted by the promise of high wages to whom Ford was unable to give jobs. The Welfare Department, however, went in for checking up on the home-life of the workers—Ford neither smokes nor drinks himself and is severe on the indulgences of others—and this was strongly resented by them. The Ford trade school, which has had much publicity, was soon converted in practice into a device for getting children to work in the shops—on the assumption, as has been said by Murray Godwin, that the mass production of radiators was the principal essential of a primary education.

Ford's pretensions to a solicitude about his men were rapidly and sweepingly abandoned. Dr. Marquis describes as follows the development of Ford's later policy: "I resigned from the Ford Motor Company in 1921. The old group of executives, who at times set justice and humanity above profits and production, were gone.… There came to the front men whose theory was that men are more profitable to an industry when driven than led, that fear is a greater incentive to work than loyalty.… The humane treatment of employees, according to these men, would lead to the weakening of the authority of the 'boss,' and to the breaking down of discipline in the shop. To them the sole end of industry was production and profits, and the one sure way of getting these things out of labor was to curse it, threaten it, drive it, insult it, humiliate it and discharge it on the slightest provocation; in short—to use a phrase much on the lips of such men, 'put the fear of God into labor.' And they were always thinking of themselves as the little gods who were to be feared." "I cannot say," says Mr. Pipp, "whether there was a marked change in Ford's attitude toward labor, or whether my close association with Ford and his organization resulted in my seeing things that I did not see before. But as time went on I would get one jolt after another, would learn of things in the Ford organization that I would have believed impossible in a civilized country.… I could see …in Ford an inclination to use the lash of his power more and more on those who resisted or opposed him. There grew, too, the desire to produce more and more at less and less cost, to get more out of the men and machinery than ever had been gotten out of them."

The idea that Ford is adored by his men has certainly never existed except outside Detroit. It is probably true that the lay-offs and speed-up due to the present depression have made them at this time particularly bitter; but one heard more or less the same story back in 1917, when the first flush of the high wages was beginning to fade. Today the Ford workers complain not only of being overworked, but also of being spied on by Ford's secret police and laid off on trumped-up pretexts. The Ford plant is infested with "spotters" looking for excuses to sack people. Mr. Cunningham tells of an old man who had been working for Ford seventeen years but who was discharged for wiping the grease off his arms a few seconds before the quitting bell, and of an office boy sent into the factory on an errand and fired for stopping off, on his way back, to buy a chocolate bar at a lunch wagon.

The most serious weakness of Ford, as an employer as well as a public man, has been a certain instability, not in his mechanical purpose, but in his feelings and his ideas. It is not that he is hypocritical: he has in fact been far more realistic than many employers are in giving away from time to time the assumptions on which his policies rest. But his mind is illogical and volatile; his genius seems purely intuitive. It is as if he had been born with a special sense of materials and mechanical processes which enabled him to see instantly what could be done with them. But in other matters he seems to be naïve and capricious. It is possible to condone his wavering, at the time of his presidential ambitions, between the Democrats and the Republicans; but the inconsistencies of his attitude toward the War reveal an appalling unreliability. After returning from the adventure of the Peace Ship, he converted his plant into a munitions factory as soon as the United States became involved in the quarrel—though he had previously threatened, according to Mr. Lochner, to take down the American flag from it and fly an international flag instead. When Mr. Benson suggested to him in 1922, at a time when diplomatic relations between Turkey and Great Britain seemed strained, that he might "sound a warning against American participation in any more European wars—to my surprise, he did precisely the opposite. 'There is going to be another war,' he said, 'and the United States should get into it at the beginning and clean them all up.'" About the same time, however, he allowed Miss Bushnell to print the statement that he had been unwilling to make money out of the War and had turned his war profits all back to the government: "Henry Ford gave all his war profits—twenty-nine millions—to the government, with no hampering conditions. This vast amount was turned back to the Treasury to be used as the government saw fit. This was the act of a pacifist. If all the war advocates had done the same, the country's war debts would not be so staggering today and there would have been less talk of war profiteers." Several people have checked on this statement and have found that it is entirely untrue. Mr. Cunningham asked the Treasury Department about it in January, 1930, and received from Ogden Mills this reply: "Treasury records do not show the receipt of any donation from Mr. Henry Ford of his war profits." Of the end of the voyage of the Peace Ship, Mr. Lochner writes as follows: "That evening … Mr. Ford received various friends. To some he gave the impression that he was going right on with the Expedition; to others that he would remain behind. To me he said at 10 P.M. that he would come on to Stockholm; to Rosika Schwimmer, about midnight, that he was positively going home."

These sudden reversals are no doubt the result of an extreme sensitivity to suggestion and to the discords and discrepancies created by the coexistence in one personality of unusual gifts and rudimentary limitations. Dr. Marquis has described, in his book, the rises and falls of Ford's moods: one day he will seem "erect, lithe, agile, full of life, happy as a child. Out of his eyes there looks the soul of a genius, a dreamer, an idealist—a soul that is affable, gentle, kindly and generous to a fault." But the next day "he will have the appearance of a man shrunken by long illness. The shoulders droop, and there is a forward slant to the body when he walks as when a man is moving forward on his toes. His face is deeply lined, and the lines are not such as go to make up a kindly open countenance. The affable gentle manner has disappeared. There is a light in the eye that reveals a fire burning within altogether unlike that which burned there yesterday. He has the appearance of a man utterly wearied and exhausted, and yet driven on by a relentless and tireless spirit. Back of an apparent physical frailty there evidently lies concealed a boundless supply of nervous energy." "It is the boyish, smiling, youthful Ford that enters the office," Mr. Benson writes in his biography. "In ten seconds and for no apparent reason, the smile may flit from his face and you behold a man who, from his eyes up, seems as old as the pyramids. Many little wrinkles dart out sidewise from his eyes. The skin is stretched rather tightly over his brow, and on each temple is a little vein resembling a fine corkscrew." Mr. Lochner's account of Ford is slightly different but it fits in with these: "In no other person," he says, "have I observed so pronounced a dual nature as in my former chief. There seems to be a constant struggle for control on the part of these two natures. The natural Henry Ford is the warm, impulsive, idealistic 'Old Man.' … The other Henry Ford has been imposed by the artificialities of modern civilization, by his environment, his business associates, his responsibilities to the huge Ford interests."

Mr. Benson has testified, also, to the uncertainty of Ford's temper. At the time of his crank campaign against the Jews, Mr. Benson ventured to disagree with him, and Ford gave him bound volumes of articles from the Dearborn Independent. "One evening the subject came up again, and when I expressed the usual dissent, he asked me if I had read the books he gave me. I said that I had read most that they contained. 'Well, read them right away,' he continued, 'and then if you do not agree with me, don't ever come to see me again.' I was so astounded that he should try to bludgeon my opinion in this manner that he may have read my thoughts in my looks. At any rate, we continued talking, and in a few minutes he came over to me, placed his hand upon my shoulder and said: 'You can always come to see me any time you want to.'"

Though Ford never contributes to charity and has been outspoken and even violent in his disapproval of it, he sometimes performs erratic acts of kindness. He is said to have given a stove to an old hermit whom he found living in the woods near Dearborn and to have celebrated the birthday of another old man whose threshing machine he had fixed in his youth by sending one of his trimotor airplanes to take him out for a ride. And he has protected the birds on his place with a tenderness almost excessive, providing them with food in winter, building thousands of birdhouses for them and even on one occasion nailing his front door up so as not to disturb a robin that had nested over it. In his malevolent moods, on the other hand, he is capable of overturning his whole organization as if it were a house of blocks which a child pushes down in a rage because he thinks that the children with whom he is playing have taken the project out of his hands; and he is ready, on occasion, to dismiss his oldest and closest associates without a word of explanation or warning. People innocently come back to their offices to discover that their departments have been abolished and that they themselves are no longer supposed to exist; they have found, in certain cases, their desks smashed to bits with an axe.

"The upper part of Ford's face," Mr. Benson writes, "is distinctively feminine. I fancy that he has his mother's eyes. His head, from the eyes up, has the nobility and the poise that one associates with a noble woman; a woman who has suffered, endured and survived—such a woman as Whistler pictured in the etching [sic] of 'My Mother.' … He was always smiling as he approached, and his eyes were looking to the side and towards the floor." Henry Ford is apparently sensitive, evasive, fickle and rather vain. When there is anything unpleasant to be done, he invariably passes the buck to subordinates, blaming arbitrary dismissals on others and becoming completely invisible when it is a question of not keeping his promises—so that persons whom the day before he has received with geniality and enthusiasm may find themselves cooling their heels in the antechambers of his executive offices, with no explanation and no excuse. They never see or hear from him again.

The despot of River Rouge, for all the tenacity and boldness of his career as an inventor and industrialist, is full of suspicions and shrinkings. His crusade against the Jews was apparently inspired by the notion that Jewish bankers were conspiring against him; and when the United States entered the War, he is said to have explained his refusal to allow his son Edsel to enlist on the ground that sinister influences in Wall Street would be sure to have him shot in the back. One is told that, when motoring around Detroit, he refuses to use the toilets of garages for fear it will "put him under obligations" to their owners. His experience under cross-examination at the Chicago Tribune libel trial, when he confused Benedict Arnold with Arnold Bennett and asserted that the American Revolution took place in 1812, is said to have inspired him with a mortal terror of ever being called into court again; and his recent fanatical interest in early American monuments and relics is plausibly ascribed to a desperate desire to correct the impression produced on that occasion.

The result of all this is that Ford today is surrounded by professional yes-men who live in terror of differing from him. But he is protected by a publicity department, one of whose principal duties is to prevent him from making a fool of himself in public. One gets the impression that Ford, spontaneous and full of original ideas, may be sometimes an agreeable companion; but he is a rambling and disjointed talker and, outside his special field, a very ignorant man, and he is always likely to embarrass his associates and get himself into trouble by issuing indiscreet or ridiculous statements. Today his publicity men, never forgetting the Peace Ship and the anti-Jewish campaign, sternly guard him from interviewers, censor his official statements and repudiate as unauthentic any interview which slips out by accident.

Ford's real first lieutenant is his general manager, that man of iron, Charles E. Sorenson, who has been with Henry Ford since his early days and who seems to carry the onus and the odium of his master's harshest policies. Mr. Lochner is no doubt right in assuming that it is mainly the logic of industrial relations themselves which has brought out the harsh side of Ford's character. Henry Ford at the time of the Peace Ship was a single unlettered idealist who, though enriched by the industrial system, had no idea of the fierce competitions which were involved in the gigantic war. When he wanted to run for president, he was not qualified in the least for the role of statesman. He was thus forced back to Detroit, to his triumphantly successful machine for more and more mass production, the only instrument of power he was sure of—in which, however, when business was bad and competition keener, he was forced to adopt the methods that his subordinates now carry out. When the market for his cars was booming and his payroll was at its thickest, he used often to drop into his factories and chat with his employees; he is said today never to visit them unaccompanied by a guard of twenty men.

The whole of the Ford plant seems stamped with its creator's qualities as few great industries are. You are aware of a queer combination of imaginative grandeur with cheapness, of meanness with magnificent will, of a North Western plainness and bleakness with a serviceable kind of distinction—the reflection of a personality that is itself a product of the cold winds, flat banks and monotony of those northern straits. The enormous motor plant which has overgrown the little town of Dearborn where Henry Ford was born, truly original creation though it is and wild dream though it would have seemed to the earlier inhabitants of Michigan, has in certain ways never transcended the primitive limitations of that crude and meager American life. Beside the tight River Rouge, in February mutton-jade and as dead and insignificant as ditch-water, between its willow thickets and the dry yellow grass of its banks, the office buildings of brick and concrete rise block-shaped and monstrous before us, like the monuments of some barbarian king approached after a journey in the wilderness. But the taste of this king is the same as that of the American five-and-ten-cent store, which is indulged here on a scale almost stupefying. The platitudes over the doors about industry and agriculture, though they are actually cut in stone, give the impression of common cement.

Inside, the reception rooms—in which men that look like police-court detectives check up grimly on everyone that enters—are equipped with yellow gumwood panels and window sills of white-grained black marble. The offices themselves are furnished with rubber-black white-veined linoleum and golden-oak furniture of flypaper yellow. Even the office workers and attendants at Ford's seem to present certain qualities in common, as if Ford had succeeded in developing a special human race of his own. There is a masculine type in Detroit which, though lumpish, is robust and dynamic, with the genial hardboiled bluffness of a Chicagoan. But the subordinates at Ford's seem to run to an unappetizing pastiness and baldness, an avoidance or a disregard of any kind of smartness of dress. Some of them have sharp brown eyes, others are gooseberry-eyed; but the preference seems to be for pale keen blue eyes like Ford's, and like Ford, they part their hair in the middle. The army of "servicemen" give the impression of a last dilution of the lusterless middle-class power which dominates the workers at Ford's. Openly jeered at by these, upon whom they are set to spy, not particularly beloved by the lower white-collars, whom they are supposed to have an eye on, too, they must keep to the right side of the middle-class line, and they prowl in the plant and the offices like sallow and hollow trolls, dreaming no doubt of executive desks.

Just outside the steel-and-concrete offices of Ford's engineering laboratory stands his early-American museum. This covers an immense area, and its main entrance—a complete reproduction of Independence Hall (according to Ford, an improvement on the original because it has the advantage of a concrete foundation)—is only a single façade in a whole series of colonial reproductions, which differ but little from one another and are limited to two or three types, very much like the sedans and tudors that one sees on the double-track conveyor, as if Ford had undertaken a mass production of Independence Halls. He likes to give old-fashioned balls, reviving the schottische and the polka, on a polished hardwood floor in these laboratories. The dancers disport themselves in a space between an antique collection of lusters and girandoles and a glossy gleaming row of new car models, and the host instructs the new generation of those older premotor families who twenty years ago, in Detroit, were still laughing at him as an upstart and a yokel.

One approaches the plant itself through the not yet salvaged materials of ancient discarded projects: a line of croquet-wickets that traces the now extinct electrified freightline of the Detroit, Toledo and Ironton, a rusty junk-heap of still-tough steel vertebrae from old merchant-marine hulls bought by Ford from the government after the war. The water-covered thawing road lies before us a dull gray-blue, like Ford fenders beaten flat, like the eyes of Ford office workers. The buildings of the plant have a certain beauty, though still a little on the dimestore size: black-tipped silver cigarette chimneys rise above elongated factories of the dull green of pale pea soup, with large darker rows of little rectangular windows. The green cement has not been tinted, this is its natural color: it is a salvage from the blast-furnace slag. Beyond a level yellowish stretch, cinder-gritty on the hither side of tracks, where dark workmen's figures move stolidly coming or going on the afternoon shift, there looms a by-products plant, a set of black siloshaped towers, with white smoke pouring low in front of them, and a blast furnace with silver cylinders and angular black cranes.

And there are parking-places densely packed with dingy dirt-colored Ford cars. Ford workers are said to be more or less blackmailed into buying these cars—whether they want them or can afford them or not—in instalments stopped out of their wages. When it was discovered a few years ago that a number of Ford workers had acquired cars of other makes, they were ordered to park them outside so as not to cause a scandal to the company; but then it was reported that the contraband cars were exciting the derision of the passers-by, and their owners were ordered to bring them in. It is doubtful whether any Ford worker has ever dared to buy a Chevrolet: Henry Ford—who once answered complacently, when asked what color a new model should be, "I don't care what color you make it so long as it's black!"—is being pressed hard by Chevrolet, who have succeeded in producing a six-cylinder car for a price almost as low as that of Ford's four-cylinder car and with a smartness which Ford cars lack.

At any rate, these Fords that are waiting today inside the Ford parking-yards have a dismal unalive look as if they were under discipline and dumbly enduring the shift. The market for Fords is poor, but these Fords have been driven here in order that their owners may make more of them. There are already far too many Ford cars, it would be well to cut down their numbers: future Fords should be sure of good homes; but the fate of their race was decided by a process of perpetual motion which was also supposed to accelerate. For years they brought their masters to the plant in order that the latter might earn money to buy more and more of the new cars which their life was occupied in fabricating. And now the old cars can feel it in their screws that the perpetual motion process, so far from accelerating, is rapidly running down—that even after they themselves have been scrapped and their bodies have been melted up to make crankshafts and connecting rods for new cars, those new cars may find no one to keep them. So, hitched, they wait here without hope.

For though Ford has fought the capitalist system according to his own lights, keeping out of the clutches of the bankers and refusing to issue inflated stock—standing out as best be could against all the attempts of big business to absorb or disintegrate his unique and intense personality, so inseparable from the thing it is making, he finds himself at last overwhelmed, helpless in the collapse of that system. Yet until we have succeeded, in the United States, in producing statesmen, organizers or engineers with the ability and the will to prevent the periodical impoverishment of the people who work for Ford and the wrecking of their energies in his factories, we cannot afford to be too critical of the old-fashioned self-made American so ignorant and short-sighted that he still believes that any poor boy in America can make good if he only has the gumption and, at a time when thousands of men, who have sometimes spent their last nickel to get there, are besieging his employment offices, can smugly assure the newspapers that "the average man won't really do a day's work unless he is caught and can't get out of it"—the man of genius so little dependable that he can break the careers of his closest associates with the petulance of a prima donna.