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51 C h a p t e r 5 Administration and Relationship to Local Communities Contrary to the Ford Motor Company’s publicity agents, the village industries never resembled the bastions of yeoman purity described in their various press releases. They were commercial enterprises as well as social experiments and, like nearly all else in the Ford empire, were under the constant scrutiny of Ford himself. “Anyone who knows Henry Ford’s working principles knows that [they] are not primarily undertaken as a form of social uplift.” So journal editor Arthur Van Vlissingen observed in 1938 about Ford’s aversion to activities whose principal concern was not greater efficiency and greater profits. Ford “would never undertake to bring about any such condition as a company enterprise unless in so doing he could at the same time improve the job, do it more profitably. It just so happened,” he concluded, “that what proves best industrially also turns out to be an improvement socially.”1 (That Ford admittedly had deep familial ties to the Dearborn area and to Michigan was conveniently overlooked here.) A typical account for public consumption of these combined financial and social virtues appeared in a 1936 book, Ford Production Methods, whose author, Hartley Barclay, was also editor of the periodical Mill and Factory: Asked about production costs, superintendents replied invariably: “Our costs are lower because we are out in the country. The men work more efficiently. Most of the men have farms or houses with large gardens located within a few miles of the plant. They live more normal lives than they would if employed in a factory located in a congested industrial region . Even through the boom years we had virtually no labor turnover. “From a management point of view we can understand and deal with our men more satisfactorily because we not only know them personally but also know where they live and what are their personal problems. 52 c h a p t e r f i v e “Bigness can often mean less rather than more efficiency. We know what every man and machine is doing all the time. We can route work through the small plants with a minimum of machine changes, handling of material and time waste.”2 Despite this and many similar assertions, Ford repeatedly refused to divulge the operating costs of his experiments, claiming only that they were profitable. He may have destroyed—or perhaps have barely kept—their financial records; notwithstanding persistent searches, I have been unable to obtain such records.3 Certainly he did not attempt to determine their costs and benefits to the same extent as for the Rouge or other large plants. An exception was his otherwise undocumented comment to journalist Drew Pearson in 1924 that it had taken 3.5 minutes and had cost 9.5 cents to make a Model T valve at Highland Park in 1920 versus 1.26 minutes and 4 cents at Northville in 1923.4 As journalist Paul Kellogg confessed after their 1924 interview, “I was unable to learn what the total is that he has put into his . . . little factories up stream on the River Rouge; . . . but it was assumed as a matter of course by the people I talked with that the millions he has already laid out exceed anything on which he is likely to get a conventional return in anything like the immediate future.”5 The reminiscences of Ford engineer Charles Voorhess are still more revealing : “As far as the actual running expense of these plants, there was no budget. No budget, he would say. Sometimes I would try to talk to him about jobs that I thought were going too high, and he’d say, ‘Why worry about that?’ You couldn’t talk money to him in regards to these plants. Money was just a tool with him, and he wanted it to be used that way. Too much accounting practice, he didn’t like, of course. These plants were built, in general, on work orders, so-called, to give a record of what they cost. They are the same work orders we use now [1952], same form.”6 Kenneth Edwards, who was chief clerk of all the village industries from 1943 to 1946 after having worked at both the Rouge and the Milan plants, conceded in a 1988 interview that economically, the village industries “didn’t make that much sense.” The case of lawn maintenance, he said...

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