Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States

Introduction

Introduction ‘‘When one speaks of increasing power, machinery, and industry,’’ Henry Ford wrote in 1922, ‘‘there comes up a picture of a cold, metallic sort of world in which great factories will drive away the trees, the flowers, the birds, and the green fields.’’ This was how he began an early memoir, on the defensive, and the rest of the book was an answer to both skeptics and critics. The bleak and foreboding imagery, Ford contended, was not right. It was a mischaracterization of what would happen with the advent of new technology and the spread of factory production. Machines, he insisted, were but a means to an end, tools for doing labor more e≈ciently and with less drudgery, which was how they ‘‘set us free to live.’’ Through industrial innovation and its proper application people did not have to give up ‘‘living’’ because they were too busy ‘‘providing the means of living.’’ Labor-saving technology could liberate humankind for ‘‘the pleasant things’’ of life. ‘‘Unless we know more about machines and their use,’’ Ford argued, ‘‘we cannot have the time to enjoy the trees, and the birds, and the flowers, and the green fields.’’∞ This answered the problem by turning it on its head. Like most of his contemporaries, Henry Ford believed that labor and leisure were two separate things, an idea based on a real division of time that had evolved with industrial capitalism. According to this view, it made perfect sense to pursue any innovations that lessened the amount of work people had to do to satisfy their needs, whether they were making cars or growing wheat. Even on his farm in Dearborn, where Ford had spent his youth and cultivated an interest in steam engines, he returned with a plan for doing everything by machinery and studied economy. ‘‘We are not farmers,’’ he explained, but ‘‘industrialists on the farm.’’ Yet in defending the machine age, Ford overlooked what was at the heart of many people’s wariness about industry. He dismissed the criticism that his methods of car manufacturing— 2 Introduction not merely the tools used—actually made the work more rather than less onerous, by deskilling and regimenting labor and turning it into a repetitive operation. He had heard from ‘‘parlour experts’’ that repetitive labor was ‘‘soul- as well as body-destroying,’’ but his own investigations, ‘‘the most thorough research,’’ had not found a single case ‘‘of a man’s mind being twisted or deadened by the work.’’ Anyway, the average worker wanted a job ‘‘where the creative instinct need not be expressed,’’ Ford maintained, one ‘‘in which he does not have to think.’’≤ Contemporary autoworkers, apparently, did not share all of these assumptions . They accepted the division of time into work and leisure, the former belonging to their employer and the latter belonging to themselves, and they organized a union at least partly to increase their time o√, by cutting hours and expanding vacation benefits. They wanted to be away from factories, however, because work there had become such an intensely disagreeable and alienating experience. The changed circumstances of their labor, transformed into toil, made improving the quantity and quality of their leisure even more imperative. ‘‘The worker in this assembly-line age needs recreation,’’ explained the United Auto Workers Recreation Department director. It was important to relax after a hard day’s work, she said, and ‘‘physical activities’’ were critical for maintaining good health. But there was the matter of certain ‘‘mental and spiritual cravings,’’ or ‘‘hungers,’’ as well, particularly the need to create something, if only ‘‘a vegetable garden, out in the back yard.’’ On the auto plant assembly lines there was ‘‘nothing creative, or combative, competitive , adventurous, or social,’’ and that left workers feeling a lack, which necessitated concerted e√orts to fill the void.≥ By the 1930s, in fact, many autoworkers had already begun to deal with the objections of their work lives by developing an avid interest in sport hunting and fishing. ‘‘Farming was better than working in the factory,’’ historian Lisa Fines explains, quoting two former employees of Reo Motors, and ‘‘hunting was better than farming.’’∂ This statement, set against Henry Ford’s industrial vision of farming as well as his apology for factory production, suggests the ways changes in people’s work were entangled with changes in people’s relationship to the natural world, as well as the implications this had for leisure. ‘‘Hunting and fishing must be thought of as recreation out of doors...