Recasting the Machine Age: Henry Ford's Village Industries

Chapter 3: Farm and Factory United

27 C h a p t e r 3 Farm and Factory United Smaller-scale tools and machines and networks of communities were not the only important dimensions of Henry Ford’s experiment. Equally significant was the prospect of healthier and happier living and working arrangements away from America’s crowded, congested cities. Despite his initial predictions that “every man will be a farmer . . . and every man will work in a factory or office,”1 Ford’s eventual dream was to employ exclusively farmers, craftsmen, and other rural folk who could either walk or quickly drive (their Fords) to and from work. On the whole, this aspect of his vision was realized; relatively few urban dwellers, including citybred workers in older Ford plants, were ever hired for the village industries. Ford usually insisted that all potential employees had to have been residents of their communities for at least six months and, to quell the fears of local businessmen of losing their best workers, that they be currently unemployed as well.2 These aspects of his vision were also realized in most cases, though there were always exceptions. All workers in the nineteen sites who lived in rural areas were strongly encouraged to retain or to acquire a plot of land on which to grow crops for personal consumption in their spare time: that is, before and after working hours and during their days off. Those workers who lacked either land or inclination for farming were nevertheless encouraged to set up small vegetable gardens near their homes in order to be more self-sufficient and healthier as well as more agrarian. As Ford was establishing the village industries, he also began promoting “Thrift Gardens” throughout his industrial empire, even among the most urbanized of his employees, who usually had less land available than their rural counterparts. Toward that end a companysponsored Garden Education Service established four large garden areas in Dearborn that could be used by any Highland Park or Rouge plant employee .3 For a small fee the company prepared the ground and assigned plots 28 c h a p t e r t h r e e to individual workers. By contrast, many other large American corporations that provided space for employees’ gardens did so only after the Great Depression had begun and those workers were desperate to supplement their incomes.4 “Rule 1 at all the small plants,” journal editor Arthur Van Vlissingen noted, “is that any man may leave at any time to work on the farm, [and] may have his job back—barring shutdowns—when he gets through farming.”5 These full-time factory workers were, then, expected to be also part-time farmers to varying degrees. According to Ford, all were beneficiaries of the very modern technology at work and at home alike that allowed them the leisure to supplement their income. As Ford explained to journalist Drew Pearson in 1924, “It is nonsense to say that because the cities are overcrowded everybody ought to move to the farm. There must be a balance between the two. The farm has its dull season, when the farmer can come into the factory, and the factory has its dull season, when the workman can get out on the land and help produce food. Transportation is the connecting link.”6 In his 1922 book My Life and Work (written with—and largely by—his frequent collaborator Samuel Crowther) Ford had added that these arrangements “might take the slack out of work” (Ford hated “slack”) and “restore the balance between the artificial and the natural” (i.e., the city and the farm).7 Or as he put it more boldly in the Ford News of April 1937, “No unemployment insurance can be compared to an alliance between a man and a plot of land. With one foot in industry and another foot in the land, human society is firmly balanced against most economic uncertainties. . . . Stocks may fail, but seedtime and harvest do not fail.”8 (Actual farmers, of course, might not be so optimistic.) The dedication of the cornerstone of the Henry Ford Museum in September 1928, with Ford, not surprisingly, presiding over the ceremony, symbolized his dual commitment to agriculture and industry. Thomas Edison not only inscribed his signature in the fresh cement but also pushed into it the spade of Luther Burbank, the famous American horticulturalist who had died two years earlier.9 Ford estimated that contemporary agricultural equipment and techniques had...