Recasting the Machine Age: Henry Ford's Village Industries (review)

With good reason, Henry Ford and the early Ford Motor Company are remembered as among the world's leading practitioners of centralized industrial production. In the mid-1920s, Ford's vertically integrated River Rouge plant employed 75,000 people and turned out 4,000 cars a day. But there was more to Ford than the Rouge. As this book demonstrates, Ford was a long-time advocate of industrial decentralization. Between 1920 and 1944, Ford opened nineteen so-called village industries, relatively small plants located within sixty miles of the company headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. As Segal argues, the history of these village industries should be of interest to students of business history, labor history, and the history of technology. Although the available evidence turns out to be disappointingly thin, parts of this book are rewarding, thanks to the author's creative, interdisciplinary approach to the subject.

Among the book's strongest parts is a short chapter dedicated to labor history, in which Segal draws upon his own interviews with former employees of the village industries. Many of those interviewed fondly recalled a "family" dynamic at the smaller factories, a far cry from the situation at the Rouge. Segal is careful, however, to point out that some workers actually sought to be transferred to larger Ford plants, which provided more opportunities for advancement in a less paternalistic atmosphere.

As business history, the book is intriguing but disappointing. Segal points out that the village industries have been overlooked by many standard studies of Ford, including the semi-official company histories by Nevins and Hill, and Brinkley.¹ Certainly, the small plants were extraordinarily important for their surrounding communities, especially in the Depression years, and available evidence suggests that they were critical links in the Ford production chain: During the 1930s, the village industries provided the company with all, or most, of several essential auto parts, including starters and lamps. Yet, their broader significance remains unclear, in part because Segal was unable to locate a substantial set of relevant business records—a legacy of Ford's notorious inattention to recordkeeping during those years. Hence, the book is unable to trace the small plants' interactions with their larger sisters, or to locate them in the larger context of Ford's supply network, which by the early 1930s involved 5,300 firms. In the end, there is little reason to question the views of many company executives, who regarded the small plants as the inefficient pets of Henry Ford. Soon after Ford's death in 1947, most of the village industries were scrapped.

Like Ford's leading biographers, including Lewis and Watts, Segal is intrigued by Ford's apparently contradictory intellect, which seemed simultaneously to embrace modernity, nostalgia, openmindedness, and bigotry.² This book suggests that the contradictions are often overblown. Segal shows that Ford's advocacy of decentralization, like similar ideas expressed by many of his contemporaries, was less nostalgic than forward-looking. Although the village industries themselves may not have succeeded in creating the economically viable synthesis of farm and factory that Ford initially imagined, this book indicates that the well-known champion of centralized mass production foresaw, to his credit, a more flexible future.