Recasting the Machine Age: Henry Ford's Village Industries

Preface and Acknowledgments

ix PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Ihave spent a good deal of my academic life on this topic, infinitely more than I could ever have imagined when I decided to write the first book-length study of Henry Ford’s nineteen village industries. True, I have written other books and articles since the earlier versions, but the project has been with me long enough, and it is time to send it out into the world. As Recasting the Machine Age contends, Henry Ford’s motives for building and funding the village industries are multiple and murky. By contrast, my reasons for writing this book are few and clear. They reflect the circumstances of my being geographically close both to those nineteen sites and to the most important primary and secondary sources about them. Soon after I began teaching the history of technology at the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering in 1978, I took several undergraduate classes to the Ford Museum and Greenfield Village (then collectively and officially known as The Edison Institute) in nearby Dearborn in order to raise their technological literacy and my own. For this initial acquaintance with the vast number of tools and machines collected by Ford and his associates, and for preliminary discussions of the vision(s) behind them, I am indebted to the late Peter Cousins, then Curator of Agriculture; to John Bowditch, then Curator of Industry; to John Wright, then Director of Education and Public Programs ; and to Steven Hamp, then my graduate student and eventually the president of the Institute, now renamed The Henry Ford. Each time I walked around the Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, I was struck by Ford’s paeans to American history—which, contrary to popular accounts, he did not denounce as altogether “bunk”—overlooking the contemporary track for testing the latest Ford Motor Company vehicles. But nothing appeared to connect them. One did not have to be as insightful as Henry Adams in The Education of Henry Adams, contemplating the respec- x Preface and Acknowledgments tive moral as well as material power of the Virgin Mary at the great medieval cathedral at Chartres and the forty-foot-high dynamos at the 1900 Paris Exposition, to wonder how the past and the present could be so physically close yet so intellectually apart. How could Ford simultaneously look forward and backward? Once I started learning about the village industries, I asked myself, why would the person most responsible for America’s large-scale, centralized manufacturing and production facilities and processes wish to provide small-scale, decentralized alternatives to them? Why would the person most responsible for luring American workers to the urban locales of most of those major factories wish to provide rural alternatives to them? When, in 1980, I joined the fifth annual “100-mile, four-county guided tour” of ten of the nineteen sites, sponsored by the Institute, things made more sense to me. The tour was led by the world’s foremost expert on Henry Ford, business historian David L. Lewis of the University of Michigan’s School of Business Administration, who had written several articles on the village industries but had no plans to publish a book on the topic. Instead, from that day on, he repeatedly encouraged me to pursue my research and was always available to answer questions. As the notes to my book indicate, his writings have been invaluable to my work. Eventually I benefited from his further assistance when, unknown to me at the time, he agreed to serve as one of the two readers for the University of Massachusetts Press. In the early 1980s, before the dissolution of my unit at the University of Michigan (the Humanities/Engineering Department), I made many visits to the Ford Archives at the Edison Institute. By that point Steve Hamp had become Director of Collections and Chief Curator of Archives and Records; he was always helpful in getting me access to materials as efficiently as possible . Cynthia Read-Miller, still Curator of Photographs and Prints, was equally supportive and greatly assisted my search for pertinent photographs from the archives’ massive collections. The late David Crippen, Curator of Special Collections and of Automotive History, was enormously helpful not only in locating and evaluating endless primary and secondary sources but also in trying to help me make sense of Ford’s complexities and seeming contradictions. The late Ford Bryan, a former Ford Motor Company spectrochemical analyst who, in retirement, wrote...