Recasting the Machine Age: Henry Ford's Village Industries (review)

The history of the Ford Motor Company is entwined with the complex and contradictory views of its founder Henry Ford. This interconnection is illustrated in Howard Segal's well-crafted account of Ford's endeavor to operate small parts factories by harnessing the power of rivers flowing through southeastern Michigan. Segal situates this experiment within the broader context of American values and its uneasy relation to industrial progress. The "village industries"—so named because each one was located in a village on the banks of the Rouge, Saline, or Huron Rivers—consisted of nineteen plants located within sixty miles of the giant Rouge factory. Most originated in the 1920s and 1930s, as Ford sought to shift production away from the Highland Park and Rouge plants in order to integrate manufacturing with agricultural production. At their peak, they employed as few as 19 and as many as 1,200 workers.

The plan was for farmers to be recruited and trained to work in these factories. While continuing to farm, they would commute to the factories to work during slack times between planting and harvesting. Manufacturing would submit to the rhythms of agricultural life. And yet Ford understood that the introduction of mechanized farming techniques—exemplified by the Fordson tractor—was destined to make farmers redundant. Viewed from this perspective, the village industries were intended to promote the entry of the industrial machine into the agrarian garden. The tension between, on the one hand, concern for the preservation of farming communities and folkways and, on the other, the necessity of expanding the scope and reach of automobility is carefully woven throughout Segal's narrative.

The village industries were curious examples of mass production, combining assembly-line processes with employment levels limited by the horsepower created by the hydroelectric generators used to operate the plants. Indeed, Segal makes much of the human scale of these plants. Through interviews with surviving workers and oral histories, he presents an image of workers as beholden to their benefactor, Mr. Ford, as they were proud of the quality of their craftsmanship. Although not all workers felt this way, the overall picture Segal paints is one of bucolic harmony, a collective sense of purpose, and unwavering gratitude. This helps to shape the trajectory of the narrative as Segal goes on to enlarge the scope of analysis to take in more general trends in support of industrial decentralization emerging during the Great Depression. He makes the case that the village-industries project both directly and indirectly influenced these trends. The "back to the land" philosophy of Henry Ford readily took hold of the popular imagination at that time.

The village industries weathered two tumultuous events that could have greatly altered life in the plants: unionization, and the demands of wartime production. Segal maintains that, aside from the wartime transformation of Willow Run into the world's largest bomber-production facility, the village industries were able to retain their rural character in spite of changes in workplace relations and demands to ramp-up production. Eventually, however, a singular definition of decentralization came to reign supreme within the auto industry. This type of decentralization was closely identified with the geographic dispersal of assembly facilities; as such, the village parts-supply plants were increasingly seen as anachronistic vestiges of an earlier era.

Like Philip Scranton's Endless Novelty, Segal's work adds an important layer of analysis to historical research on the alternative shape and contour of U.S. manufacturing. It opens up fertile ground for further research around issues of technology, labor–management relations, and local economic development. How did the village plants utilize technology differently when functions were moved out of the Rouge? What differences were there in the way industrial unionism was implemented in small plants? How did the local economy in which...