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87 C h a p t e r 8 The Decentralists and Other Visionaries Henry Ford’s village industries did not come about in a vacuum, as the realization of one very rich and powerful man’s unique fantasies. Rather, they were part of efforts in many parts of America between the world wars to reverse the course of industrial urban life by promoting decentralization through the depopulation of large cities and through the adoption of smaller-scale but still modern technology useful for farms, villages, and individual households. One historian has characterized certain of these efforts as attempting to launch “the utopian reconstruction of modern civilization.”1 “Decentralization” became a buzzword of this period.2 Visions of a decentralized America inevitably differed, but virtually all embraced cheap electricity distributed to every citizen for domestic and business use alike, regardless of the distance from power sources. What Henry Ford, through the village industries, was trying to do in the private sector in Michigan, the Franklin Roosevelt administration, through various rural electrification programs, was trying to do in the public sector across the country. In both cases, cheap electricity was avowedly linked to social and industrial decentralization.3 To be sure, this was not a vision peculiar to the 1930s. Carolyn Marvin writes of the belief in late nineteenth-century America that “abundant, easily distributed, versatile electricity would reverse the centralization of production in factories, lead to the rise of clean cottage industries, unify the home and the workplace, and lower the divorce rate.”4 As in the 1930s, the largescale industrial centralization made necessary by steam power would no longer apply. The difference with the New Deal, however, was the federal government’s pioneering and systematic effort to realize this vision throughout America.5 (Although this same interwar period saw the rise and popularization of various visions of skyscraper utopias centralizing huge populations 88 c h a p t e r e i g h t and institutions and heavily reliant on electricity, these otherwise antithetical schemes were both reactions against the overcrowding, congestion, crime, and related ills of American cities lamented by Ford, among others.)6 At least two prominent New Deal officials, Harry Hopkins, director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, and Rexford Tugwell, director of the Resettlement Administration, publicly praised the village industries, despite their considerable political and economic differences with Ford. Hopkins said that “it would be a good thing for America if large cities disappeared and their industries were scattered in a thousand smaller communities.”7 And Tugwell characterized these efforts as representing “Henry Ford at his best.”8 President Roosevelt himself, according to Reynold Wik, wrote Ford in 1934 of his own belief in the relocation of persons and smaller industries from cities to towns. He invited Mr. and Mrs. Ford to visit him in Warm Springs, Georgia, to pursue the matter, but apparently they never met, at least not about this.9 The Roosevelt administration ultimately constructed approximately one hundred communities under various New Deal agencies, but most bore little resemblance to Ford’s village industries. Many were predominantly agricultural; others combined farming with small crafts as opposed to actual factories.10 The community that probably came closest to the village industries was Jersey Homesteads, established in 1936 by the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Located five miles from Hightstown, New Jersey, Jersey Homesteads recruited two hundred garment workers primarily from New York City. They were hired to work nine months of the year in a government-sponsored garment factory and three months on a government-sponsored 600-acre farm. Because of the project’s proximity to urban centers, the clothes manufactured there could be sold and shipped to those centers quite easily. This one experiment was to be the model for others elsewhere in the country. These parallels to the village industries are striking, but so are the differences . To begin with, the workers did not own their own homes, unlike most of the village industries workers. Instead, the FSA rented the settlers some two hundred homes set amid 1,200 woodland acres. More important, the experiment failed after just a few years because the workers preferred to labor full time inside the modern, air-conditioned garment factory and as little as possible outside on the three often hot and humid farms. Consequently , the farm work was relegated to a few full-time farmers and some transient African Americans. Just as journalist Paul Kellogg had discovered in the 1920s that many...

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