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    The Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire
    The Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire
    The Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire
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    The Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire

    By Elizabeth Esch

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    The Color Line and the Assembly Line tells a new story of the impact of mass production on society. Global corporations based originally in the United States have played a part in making gender and race everywhere. Focusing on Ford Motor Company’s rise to become the largest, richest, and most influential corporation in the world, The Color Line and the Assembly Line takes on the traditional story of Fordism. Contrary to popular thought, the assembly line was perfectly compatible with all manner of racial practice in the United States, Brazil, and South Africa. Each country’s distinct racial hierarchies in the 1920s and 1930s informed Ford’s often divisive labor processes. Confirming racism as an essential component in the creation of global capitalism, Elizabeth Esch also adds an important new lesson showing how local patterns gave capitalism its distinctive features. 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of California Press
    Release dateMay 4, 2018
    ISBN9780520960886
    The Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire
    Author

    Elizabeth Esch

    Elizabeth D. Esch is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas. She is the coauthor, with David Roediger, of The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in US History.

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      Book preview

      The Color Line and the Assembly Line - Elizabeth Esch

      The Color Line and the Assembly Line

      THE GEORGE GUND FOUNDATION

      IMPRINT IN AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES

      The George Gund Foundation has endowed

      this imprint to advance understanding of

      the history, culture, and current issues

      of African Americans.

      The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the George Gund Foundation Imprint in African American Studies.

      AMERICAN CROSSROADS

      Edited by Earl Lewis, George Lipsitz, George Sánchez, Dana Takagi, Laura Briggs, and Nikhil Pal Singh

      For a full list of titles in the series, see the final pages of this volume.

      The Color Line and the Assembly Line

      MANAGING RACE IN THE FORD EMPIRE

      Elizabeth D. Esch

      UC Logo

      UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

      University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

      University of California Press

      Oakland, California

      © 2018 by The Regents of the University of California

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Esch, Elizabeth D., author.

      Title: The color line and the assembly line : managing race in the Ford empire / Elizabeth D. Esch.

      Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Series: American crossroads | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

      Identifiers: LCCN 2017039784 (print) | LCCN 2017043314 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520960886 (e-edition) | ISBN 9780520285378 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520285385 (pbk : alk. paper)

      Subjects: LCSH: Ford Motor Company. | Racism in the workplace—Michigan—20th century. | Racism in the workplace—Brazil—20th century. | Racism in the workplace—South Africa—Port Elizabeth—20th century. | Automobile industry and trade—Employees—Social conditions—20th century.

      Classification: LCC HD9710.U54 (ebook) | LCC HD9710.U54 F27 2018 (print) | DDC 331.6/3—dc23

      LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017039784

      27  26  25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18

      10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

      To my parents, Raymond Gates Esch, Junior, and Janet Allen Esch

      And to the millions of Ford workers across the world yesterday, today, and tomorrow

      CONTENTS

      Preface and Acknowledgments

      Introduction • The Color Line and the Assembly Line

      1 • Ford Goes to the World; the World Comes to Ford

      2 • From the Melting Pot to the Boiling Pot: Fascism and the Factory-State at the River Rouge Plant in the 1920s

      3 • Out of the Melting Pot and into the Fire: African Americans and the Uneven Ford Empire at Home

      4 • Breeding Rubber, Breeding Workers: From Fordlandia to Belterra

      5 • Work in the Factory Itself: Fordism, South Africanism, and Poor White Reform

      Conclusion • From the One Best Way to The Way Forward to One Ford—Still Uneven, Still Unequal

      Notes

      Selected Bibliography

      Index

      ILLUSTRATIONS

      1. The Ford Family’s holdings at the beginning of World War II

      2. The Ford empire circa 1941

      3. Charles Sorensen with foundry workers at the Highland Park plant

      4. Highland Park plant workers climb in and out of the melting pot in order to receive their diplomas from Ford’s English School

      5. People in Gold Coast, West Africa, pictured with a Model T

      6. African American workers worked the hottest and most dangerous jobs in the Rouge plant

      7. George Washington Carver as Henry Ford’s guest at Greenfield Village, where he sat in a slave cabin at Henry’s suggestion

      8. Dorothea Lange captured this billboard while working for the WPA, California, 1937

      9. Workers wearing Ford identification badges at their waists while working to clear the rainforest on Ford’s Amazon plantations

      10. Packing crates like these were used by Black South Africans excluded from the town of Port Elizabeth to build houses in a squatter community subsequently named KwaFord

      PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      Many years ago I became intrigued by the detail from Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry frescoes that appears on the cover of this book. Why, in the midst of an epic work celebrating human labor on one hand and technological innovation on the other had Rivera decided to insert the scowling figure of Ford production manager Charles Sorensen in such a literal way? Other named figures in the frescoes—arts patron Edsel Ford, Detroit Art Institute director William Valentiner, inventor Thomas Edison—appear largely as symbols, tribute to one or another accomplishment and in gratitude for offering this commission to Rivera. But Sorensen—popularly known among workers as the slave-driver—appears here doing just what he did in reality: pressing workers through fear and the threat of force to work faster on the assembly line. Dressed in a business suit and clutching the clipboard that—like the stopwatch—signified Ford’s constant surveillance of workers’ movements and attempts at self-expression Sorensen’s fierce and hovering presence is a potent representation of how power was wielded and production was achieved on Ford’s assembly lines.

      This detail is also captivating in its depiction of who is being managed. The two workers who form a triangle with Sorensen are of different races, one with light skin and one with dark. In the Rouge that Rivera depicted these men could possibly both be European immigrant workers, one possibly Slavic, the other perhaps Italian. Representing such differences as highly visible between two people counted today in the United States as white would have been consistent with how people understood and saw racial difference marked by color and hierarchy in 1932. But we could also assume that here Rivera was intentionally situating a Black and a white worker side by side, co-managed by the same intensity, the same rules and in the same job in the plant. Not only would this be consistent with Rivera’s own idealism about the harmonious potential of the factory, but surely Rivera would have known also that Henry Ford was famous for his unprecedented hiring of Black workers at the Rouge—this might even have been noted by the company itself as Rivera visited and studied the Rouge plant in preparation for his work.

      It is nonetheless unlikely that Rivera would have actually encountered a Black worker next to a white worker on the production line in the early 1930s at the Rouge. While it is true that Ford boasted of his employment of Black workers in every department and had hired nearly 10,000 African Americans by 1930, the existing record and anecdotal evidence suggest that it is highly unlikely that a Black worker would have been employed in this aspect of production. It would be far more likely to see a Black and a white worker side-by-side in the enormous foundry at the Rouge where jobs that had been held at Ford’s first assembly line by Eastern European workers were more and more frequently being filled by African American workers. Even this, though, was a department becoming segregated as Eastern Europeans refused to do jobs increasingly considered Black.

      That Ford hired such large numbers of African American workers led historians who studied Ford and the unionization of Detroit to accept the claim that the best way to describe Henry Ford was as a paternalist, a believer in uplift through work and wages. At a time when no other auto firms hired Black workers, surely, the thinking went, it would not be possible to view Henry Ford or his company as racist. Yet to not consider that racism may have structured Ford’s decision to hire Black workers is to fall into a habit that has become far too easy in telling histories of race and segregation in the United States. After all, this was not the Jim Crow South, this was Detroit, soon to be named the Arsenal of Democracy, and because life conditions for African American workers may have been better there than in, say, Birmingham, Alabama, historians tend to thus describe it as less racist. And certainly a firm that actually hired Black workers could not be as racist as those that refused to do so.

      How then do we account for the subsequent history of racist segregation in work, housing, and education; the racist violence; the difference in life expectancy; and the denial of mobility that characterized the growth of Detroit and its suburbs? If the richest man in the world and one of the three most powerful employers in Detroit and in the United States as a whole was promoting non-racialism surely this should have given a different character to what used to be called race relations in Detroit. And how do we account for the fact that by 1965 Black rank and file auto workers at the Rouge plant were fighting against their segregation into production jobs they had once been excluded from? Access to job classifications had changed at the Rouge but the fact of racial segregation and differential treatment in the plant had not. Nor had deeply segregated patterns of housing or home ownership.

      This project emerged out of an interest in reconciling those realities, in trying to come up with an historic understanding of how race in the United States continues to order, exclude, include, and categorize people in ways that might differ by region or workplace but that remained present across all regions of the United States through the twentieth century and that have hugely determinative impacts on what are now described as life chances and outcomes. It also emerged from a lifelong fascination with the factory-scape, the built and social environments that factories both are and enable. Growing up in a deindustrializing city during the 1980s I listened as racist explanations took hold to explain factory closings, watched news reports of the bashing of Japanese imports and learned about Vincent Chin, a Chinese worker at an auto-parts shop beaten to death in Highland Park (site of Ford’s first auto assembly line) by Chrysler superintendent Ronald Ebens and his stepson who wielded baseball bats and reportedly screamed at Chin that it was because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work! My dear friend (and a lifelong community organizer) Elsa Barboza helped me understand the contours of that world as we encountered it together and worked to forge anti-racist possibilities for our lives. I am grateful for her friendship across all these years.

      As a young activist in Ann Arbor and Detroit I was very lucky to come into contact with some of the smartest analysts of workplace power and the auto industry in the United States. Jane Slaughter, Mike Parker, and Kim Moody have consistently provided the most clear-minded and useful tools for understanding how managerial strategies change in response to both worker self-activity and crises of capital. That they have continued to research and write largely outside the context of the university and for workers underlines the depth of their commitments and the significance of their analyses. Indeed, this project emerges in part from conversations that started way back then with activist auto workers and their advocates in Detroit and beyond.

      To paraphrase a novelist I admire: everyone we work with is smart. Thus the challenge is not to be smart, the challenge is to be kind. Like most of us who work in academic fields, I have experienced both kindness and unkindness at the hands of very smart people. Having the space here to thank those whose kindness, intellectual generosity, and devotion to using their energy and insights to change the world is the greatest pleasure and privilege. The actual research that led to this book began many years ago as a seminar paper under the direction of Robin D. G. Kelley. My first archive visit led me to the papers on Ford’s rubber plantations, Fordlandia and BelTerra; on that trip I opened boxes that had been sealed since they were shipped from Brazil to the United States in the late 1940s. Bark samples and rubber tapping tools fell crumbling out of boxes and inspired me to follow their traces. While that trip was meant to lead to a paper on the history of the Ford Rouge plant it instead opened the door to studying the Rouge as the center of a global empire that itself centered on the labor of Black workers. My gratitude to Robin for his support before, during, and since that time knows no bounds; I have benefitted from his fine mind and big heart in ways too numerous to count and feel lucky to call him a friend.

      Other scholars at NYU who likewise embraced my decision to pursue this work shaped my thinking in indelible ways. Tom Bender’s invitations to participate in the La Pietra Conferences on Internationalizing the Study of American History gave me access to foundational conversations about the promise and peril of decentering U.S. power at a time when it appeared to be unlimited in its scope. Tom’s support of my work in and out of his dissertation seminar, including for a research trip to South Africa, provided grounding I badly needed. Walter Johnson particularly helped me to understand the dangers inherent in syntheses that assigned capacities to elites for knowledge across space and time greater than they indeed possessed. His insistence that transnational studies of the U.S. past not do the dreamwork of contemporary neoliberal capital continues to focus my thinking. I thank him for many fun and challenging conversations and for a subsequent invitation to Harvard to think through my work with other scholars engaged in an array of transnational projects.

      Long before I even met Marilyn Young and had the chance to work with her I read her work while living in the Israeli Occupied West Bank. I had learned about Marilyn from award-winning journalist Gloria Emerson who had inspired my decision to leave school and to try my hand at working as an itinerant journalist in the Middle East. Gloria was then at work finishing the research for her book Gaza: A Personal Account from an Occupied Land and introduced me to a generation of women journalists and scholars who tried to unmask the truth about the United States in the world. In preparing for the military buildup that would lead to the Gulf War then-president George H. W. Bush argued that the United States fought in Vietnam with one hand tied behind its back because of protest against it. In response to this claim Marilyn wrote that in Vietnam the United States fought with both its hands and both its feet and all its teeth. This sentence characterized her continued determination to tell the truth about U.S. imperialism and its expansion and I will forever be grateful for the many hours I got to spend with Marilyn in New York and Italy. I hope some of the clarity of language and purpose she modeled is evident in these pages.

      Molly Nolan likewise took me under her scholarly and political wing in more ways than I imagine she realizes. Her support for graduate student union organizing and commitment to activist expressions of disagreement with university and U.S. policies across a range of concerns provided a model for engaged professor-ing that we should all hope to match. I hope this work lives up to the example she set in her own early and excellent study of Ford in Germany.

      Special thanks to Rick Halpern for providing multiple years of support through conferences and workshops at the University of Toronto and the Centre for the Study of the United States at the Munk Centre for Global Affairs. Rick’s early and continued commitment to transnational and comparative studies that centered both race and labor have remained a model for decentering and reassessing the place of the nation state in histories from below.

      George Lipsitz has inspired me to try to write the daily life of racism and resistance, culture and capitalism since I first read Rainbow at Midnight many years ago. I am eternally grateful for his support in making this book happen and for his continued generosity. George says that we don’t write in isolation but in solitude; these words have sustained me through some lonely moments of questioning and helped me remember what writing is ultimately for.

      Peter Rachleff provided assistance, close reading, and support at various stages of this project. His own work both in and out of the academy has taught me so much about internationalism, rank and file militancy, and solidarity.

      In researching this book I benefitted from support from Mellon Sawyer Foundation–funded fellowships in transnational study at Stanford University and the University of Illinois. I wish to express special and heartfelt thanks to Joel Beinin, Monica Wheeler, and other members of the Stanford History Department Mellon Seminar, whose graciousness and kindness toward me at a difficult time provided a model of solidarity far too rare in academic contexts. At UIUC I am especially grateful to the transnational and critical interdisciplinary scholars who welcomed me: Faranak Miraftab, Zsuzsa Gille, Ken Salo, Kristin Hoganson, Antoinette Burton, and Michael Rothberg all provided space for feedback at the critical earliest moments of this work.

      I want to thank Janet Jakobsen, Neferti Tadiar, Beck Jordan-Young, Dorothy Ko, Eric Foner, Severin Fowles, Paige West, Elizabeth Bernstein, and my talented American Studies students, especially Suzanne Walker and Anna Ziering at Barnard College/Columbia University. At the University of Kansas I finished this book while getting to know an inspiring community of colleagues, especially those in Faculty for a Safer Campus who continue to fight valiantly against the absurdity that is concealed carry on our campus. These include Maryemma Graham, Edgar Tidwell, Cécile Accilien, Darren Canady, Jennifer Hamer, Shawn Alexander, Ben Chappel, Cheryl Lester, Katie Batza, Henry Bial, Joo Ok Kim, Chris Perreira, Clarence Lang, Randal Jelks, and Ayesha Hardison.

      I have benefitted from the opportunity to present this work over the years to audiences at Wayne State University, the University of Illinois, the University of Toronto, Oxford University, Goldsmith’s University of London, the University of the Witswatersrand, the University of Mississippi, Queen Mary University, Harvard University, and at numerous scholarly conferences. In these and other rooms I have encountered scholars who have inspired me through their many contributions. These include Alan Wald, Salim Tamari, Nikhil Singh, Jordan Camp, Christina Heatherton, Manu Vimalassery, Zach Sell, Bashar Tarabieh, Robbie Shilliam, Gerard Hanlon, Sara Farris, Chris Newfield, Alberto Toscano, Brenna Bhandara, Moon Ho Jung, and Avery Gordon.

      While it may be a little out of place in acknowledgments of this kind, it is important that I thank the surgeons, physical therapists, and their staffs with whom I have worked since this project started. Five spinal surgeries and countless hours of rehab made this book and the rest of my life possible and I am grateful to those talented medical professionals. Many friends sustained me through some very challenging years, and I will never be able to thank them enough. They include Kimberly Gilmore and Michael LaCombe, (both founding members of CANS, the Committee Against Nay-Saying who always hit the whole ball), Rachel Mattson, Catherine Sameh, Danny Widener, Fanon Wilkins, Steve Downs, David Levin, Pam Galpern, Simone Sagovac, Erin Small, Nico Pizzolato, Josh Fraidstern, Andrea Morrell, Sally Cooper, and Blake Schwarzenbach. I used to say that I owed Blake especially for the adjectives but now I’d just like to thank him for, well, everything, maybe most for finding hope in hard times. All of us would be well served to remember Blake’s lyric it’s not what you sell/it’s what you make. Love and gratitude to my brothers Dan and Tom and to my sister Emily.

      David Randall Roediger may be the only person happier than I am that this book is finally finished. He has shaped my life in immeasurable ways and because I can not find the words I will simply cite the refrigerator magnet: Cancer (the Crab) June 22 to July 23. Tenacious. Intuitive. Perceptive. Supportive. Helpful. Encouraging. Caring and Kind. Devoted. Dependable. Imaginative. Sensitive. Self Reliant. Compassionate. Nicer than everyone else. For being all those things and more I am grateful to him.

      Lastly I wish to thank my parents, to whom this book is dedicated. Shortly before my father died he reminded me of his conviction that the most important thing we can do is remain teachable. My parents have exemplified that commitment in lives filled with courage and openness to change even in the face of difficult odds. I hope this work goes a small way toward repaying all they have given me.

      INTRODUCTION

      The Color Line and the Assembly Line

      FIGURE 1. The Ford Family’s holdings at the beginning of World War II. Courtesy R. M. Chapin, Jr., for Time Magazine , March 17, 1941.

      IN 1903 HENRY FORD INCORPORATED the Ford Motor Company. That same year the sociologist, historian, and activist W.E.B. Du Bois published this remarkably prescient claim: The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races in Asia and Africa, in America and in the islands of the sea.¹ Within two decades Ford would expand to become one of the largest employers on earth, a global company with workplaces, dealerships, and customers in more than twenty countries. By 1927 its product, the Model T, would be far and away the top-selling car in the world, accounting for half of all cars on the planet. So, too, would the color line expand, to belt the world as Du Bois subsequently described it, bringing increasing rather than decreasing numbers of people into white supremacist–structured hierarchies. Despite this shared and simultaneous globality, however, both are conventionally treated as relating to far more nationally specific realities—Ford to narrowly American realities, and Du Bois to narrowly African American ones.²

      This book is a study of how, and how unevenly, the Ford Motor Company promoted both the idea of and the application of the color line to structure mass production as it expanded globally. Simultaneously, it demonstrates how what I call the ethos of the assembly line was put to work in the service of white supremacist ideas and racial-segregationist practices at Ford and via Ford as the company built its self-described empire through the 1930s. In these years Ford relied on the color line and the assembly line as mutually reinforcing forces in the global production of not just cars but also men, a goal Henry Ford himself bragged about regularly and often. Indeed, from 1914 through the Great Depression, Ford and his managers claimed to be as devoted to making men as they were to making cars in the United States and all over the world.³ This book further argues that Ford’s claim to do both—make cars and make men—accounted for broad transnational interest in and embrace of techniques in social engineering and mass production that by the early 1920s were coming to be known as Fordist. Men-making was a core contribution of this early Fordism and led governments, social scientists, intellectuals, financiers, and nationalists globally to seek out the ideas associated with Ford as well as the actual investment of the company in their countries after World War I.

      This study examines societies where Ford—the company as employer and Henry and his small coterie of managers as ideologues—was mobilized in the service of dynamics that I call race development and white managerialism. It focuses explicitly on the white supremacist expressions and national developmentalist goals of Fordist men-making in Brazil, South Africa, and the United States. Relationships begun between transnational Ford managers and nationalizing elites in these years would prove to be hugely significant as Ford became one of the largest and most powerful industrial employers in each of these countries by the middle of the twentieth century. Specifically this work examines a set of sites where local elites and intellectuals accessed workers on the job and in their homes. Making common cause with Ford’s ideas about men-making and the management of production meant thinking both dialectically and instrumentally about homeplace and workplace.

      The fact that the assembly line affected ideas about and organization of work even in workplaces where no actual assembly line existed is an essential feature of the methodological approach of the book as well as of its findings. The massive changes that attended assembly line production in the emergent auto industry were felt largely in economic and social terms. But they were always imbricated in other systems of repression, dominance, protest, and struggle. As Ford management increased its capacity to standardize and control production via technology, it constantly needed to find ways to control the subjective expressions of workers. Thus the assembly line as a social problem entered the homes and lives of workers on multiple scales.

      In each of these national contexts idealized notions of standardization and efficiency promoted by Ford influenced social scientific theory and became intertwined with beliefs in white supremacy as a mechanism of national improvement and progress. For the emergent class of liberal social scientists and managerial bureaucrats in Brazil, South Africa, and the United States in the 1920s, the problem of national development had been named a racial one. The case studies here demonstrate that this took very different shape because of different conditions in each of these societies. But they also show how elites in these societies shared in common an overarching belief in white as the racial designation of civility, progress, modernity, and order as well as a determination to use ideas and techniques associated with Ford in social reform projects.

      Through the first four decades of the twentieth century, liberal elites across the globe who made arguments about the desirability and feasibility of racial segregation and national improvement increasingly did so in terms of efficiency and standardization. In South Africa and Brazil, like the United States industrializing countries with mixed European, African, Asian, and Indigenous populations, these debates reflected shared commitments to the idea that mass production, mass consumption, and white racial supremacy were parts of a twentieth-century modern whole. In each of these societies, as in the United States, ideas about work, consumption, and progress became inseparable from developmental concerns about the very bodies of those who worked and consumed. How such workers would be viewed, often through the prism of eugenic ideas—as citizens, potential citizens needing fixing, or those who needed to be excluded from citizenship—was framed in terms of racial fitness.⁴

      Looking at early evidence of Ford’s presence in Brazil and South Africa shows that the company supported local and national efforts to name, draw, redraw, and harden the color line in the years between World Wars I and II. It also reveals that South African and Brazilian interest in Ford reflected the sense that the company was willing to accede to local political and social concerns that took the shape of exclusionary or segregationist practices. Elites believed that the practical and ideological application of Fordism served the interests of their own national and racial development dreams, seeing in Ford a source not just of jobs and capital but also of social and cultural direction in building new societies and new people. The company encouraged Brazilian and South African planners to borrow from Ford’s modern industrial process, connecting Fordist ideas to white supremacist social initiatives that were local. This means that in each national case presented here, white managerialism was understood and promoted as progressive, civilizing, transformative, and efficient—all ideals associated with Ford’s combined efforts in making cars and making men. Further, the case studies presented here show how these processes are much more aptly described as Fordist Brazilianization and Fordist South Africanization than they are as Americanization.

      It is perhaps ironic that through serious consideration of the range of historical differences in these societies, a similar transnational interest in racial development and improvement becomes discernable across the spectrum of liberal and corporatist ideologies in Brazil, South Africa, and the United States. In all of these places the word Ford—evoking both Henry Ford and his company—became associated with what one South African journalist described as a commitment to saving human detritus from the scrap heap of history.⁵ And as the historian Jerry Davila has shown in his meticulously researched Diploma of Whiteness, social scientists and planners in Brazil accessed Fordism not just as a source of economic modernization but for improvement of the so-called national racial stock via social scientific and educational reforms.⁶

      DEARBORN AS CENTER OF THE FORD EMPIRE

      The company’s global expansion coincided with and depended on the growth of Ford in the United States itself. In 1927 Ford was the largest employer in the largest industry in the largest economy in the world. Throughout the late teens and twenties Ford’s devotion to vertical integration was coming to fruition as the company sucked up coal mines, timber mines, gravel pits, rail-lines, ships, and land in its quest for total control of the terms of mass automobile production. By 1925 in Michigan the massive new River Rouge complex had eclipsed Ford’s first belt-driven assembly plant in Highland Park. Plans for the new plant had begun even as Highland Park was being celebrated for its astonishing success in the use of moving assembly line technology and for productivity increases that date to the introduction of the five-dollar daily wage in 1914. But Ford was distinguished from its earliest years forward by management’s attention to constant improvement in the search for what Henry Ford called the one best way; almost immediately the limits of production at the first assembly plant were seen as surmountable and would be resolved, or so management argued, both in and via the megafactory on the Rouge River.

      More than a decade in the making, by the time the Rouge was fully on line (the period under study in this book) Ford’s commitments to Americanizing immigrant workers that had famously attended the advent of the five-dollar day at its Highland Park plant were all but over. The timing of these developments is of significance to the argument of this book for several reasons. Ford’s reputation as a welfare capitalist interested in the well-being of his often immigrant employees was earned in an earlier political and economic era in the United States and in Detroit. As Stephen Meyer so brilliantly documented more than three decades ago, the progressive Sociological Department at Ford was replaced—by the end of World War I—with increasingly repressive techniques of surveillance and control of the workforce. Interest in the Americanization of European immigrants gave way to support for immigration restriction among Ford managers, culminating in their acquiescence to or outright support for the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924. Like many of their peers who supported immigration restriction, Ford managers increasingly saw themselves as Anglo-Saxons historically and Anglo-Americans politically, claiming the arguments for white Protestant racial purity that bolstered Johnson-Reed as their own.⁷ Second, it was in these years that Ford began to hire African American workers overwhelmingly for work in the forge and foundry at the new Rouge plant and to attract Mexican migrants to Detroit. This hiring took place at the height of Ford’s public support for racist political activism and anti-Semitism, which calls into question the oft-repeated idea that Henry Ford was unique among his peers for seeing African American workers as being the same as white workers. This study challenges the notion that hiring African American workers made Ford a more socially progressive firm than others in Detroit. Instead, by situating this history in the context of a transnational consideration of how Ford helped to strengthen belief in the color line, it asks us to rethink the terms in which we understand the history and dynamics of racism in the U.S. urban north. It argues that Ford thought of Black migrant workers to Detroit as more akin to colonized subjects and treated them as such. African American workers were to the company neither sufficiently American nor Americanizable, a fact that pushes us to find new language to describe Ford’s relationship to Black Detroit in the context of overall arguments about the company’s paternalism.

      At home as well as globally Ford exploited unevenness, so much so that we ought to question whether debates over Fordism take sufficient account of

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