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6 C h a p t e r 1 Henry Ford’s Village Industries Origins, Contexts, Rationales Not far from the superhighways, skyscrapers, and huge auto plants of the greater Detroit area are the remnants of Henry Ford’s surprisingly little-known but still significant experiments in decentralized technology. The “village industries,” as Ford himself called them, were designed as small-scale, widely dispersed, frequently pastoral alternatives to the huge urban industrial systems characteristic of modern technological societies—the very systems Ford had helped to devise. They constituted a degree of decentralization considerably greater than that found in other large corporations of the day. “Everybody talks about industrial decentralization, the same as they do about the weather.” So wrote Arthur Van Vlissingen in a 1938 issue of Factory Management and Maintenance, of which he was editor. “But there the analogy ends. Because somebody most decidedly is doing something about it. Several somebodies. Notably Ford Motor Company.”1 The village industries Van Vlissingen went on to describe made different parts for Ford cars and trucks and were an integral part of the Ford Motor Company. So intriguing was Van Vlissingen’s analysis that no less a popular organ than the Reader’s Digest reprinted it (condensed, of course).2 Set in communities along the often picturesque Rouge (seven sites), Raisin (five), Huron (four), Saline (two), and Clinton (one) Rivers in southeastern Michigan—none of them more than sixty miles from Ford world headquarters in Dearborn—these factories coupled rural settings and “traditional” values with the latest tools, machines, and assembly-line processes in a variety of interesting combinations. As such, they constituted twentieth-century versions of the “machine in the garden,” to use Leo Marx’s now classic phrase.3 They were the successors to Lowell, Lawrence, Waltham , and other nineteenth-century pioneering industrial communities established in pastoral locales. Less directly, they were the successors as well Henry Ford’s Village Industries 7 to the hundreds of small colonial settlements built on rivers, each community with its saw, grist, paper, fulling, or other type of mill in the center.4 As William Simonds, a Ford publicist, declared in 1927, “Industrialism does not necessarily mean hideous factories of dirty brick, belching smoke stacks and grimy workmen crowded into ramshackle hovels”; instead, “the little Ford plants are placed in leafy bowers and surrounded with flowering shrubs, green bushes and trees. The spots you would select for a picnic Henry Ford has picked for factory sites.”5 Addressing a national radio audience on the Ford Sunday Evening Hour in 1935, another Ford publicist, W. J. Cameron, observed that “some who felt as Ruskin and Wordsworth did about the invasion of the countryside by railroads, have found to their pleasant surprise that these country industries are really a native note in the landscape.”6 True, one would expect positive comments like these from Ford’s publicists; but one would not necessarily expect the explicit refutation of the machine allegedly ruining the garden. That all the village industries were established in locales long familiar to Ford was hardly an accident. As a child he had gone to one future site (Nankin Mills) to grind grain with his father; as a newlywed he had spent his honeymoon at another (Northville); and as an aspiring auto manufacturer he had sought funding for his fledgling company in a third (Plymouth). Moreover , he had been born and raised in then rural Dearborn and lived his entire life there. As a schoolboy he had made his first moving device, a small waterwheel with a dam and a mill that he constructed in a ditch near his schoolyard —to the delight of his friends. In 1909, as the Model T was becoming successful, Ford had bought property on both sides of the Rouge near his boyhood home. A year later he had built his first hydroelectric system. Five years after that, he at once built his permanent home on this site and enlarged that system, assisted in that enterprise by Thomas Edison. Some, in fact, see his estate, Fair Lane, now a National Historic Landmark, as “a partial prototype for the village industries that followed.”7 Although Ford’s first factory, the Mack Avenue plant in Detroit (1903), was both small enough in size and workforce and flexible enough in management style to resemble the later village industries, its urban setting bore no relation to the latter enterprises or, for that matter, to Ford’s own background. Far from being simple...

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