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Reviewed by:
  • America’s Assembly Line by David E. Nye
  • Louis Rodriquez
America’s Assembly Line
David E. Nye
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013
xii + 338 pp., $29.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper)

Every day most of us participate in the luxury of easy transportation that Henry Ford left us. When he died in April 1947, it is estimated that more than seven million workers in one way or another paid tribute to this remarkable man. However, for those of us who study the history of labor and technology, Ford’s legacy is far more complex.

For most of us, Ford’s legacy is the Model T, or that he democratized and revolutionized automobile transportation in the United States and by extension most of the world. This accomplishment alone would have been enough to immortalize him. The automobile has changed or touched every aspect of our lives: where and how we live, how we relate to each other, what we eat, how we spend our leisure time, how and where we shop, and how we entertain ourselves, to name but a few.

The enormity of the impact the automobile has had on our lives cannot not be overstated. Although he did not invent the automobile or for that matter the assembly line, his Model T was produced on a scale that made it affordable to almost everyone. With the Model T, Ford transformed a luxury into a necessity that irrevocably changed us all.

With the one hundredth anniversary of the Model T, we have an opportunity to revisit and reassess the contributions of Henry Ford. Historians have an opportunity to refocus their thoughts on one of the most influential technologies of the twentieth century. A reassessment of Ford’s legacy will allow us to reconsider his contributions. Because the Model T cast such a large shadow, it has obscured what perhaps may have been a greater gift: the assembly line.

With America’s Assembly Line, an in-depth and comprehensive look at the other, less well appreciated Ford innovation, David E. Nye asks us to get out from under the Model T and take a more complete look at what Ford actually left us. What Nye’s research reveals is that the scale of Ford’s contributions is not completely recognized without further consideration of the assembly line—an innovation, Nye’s evidence shows, that unleashed forces that have shaped much of the industry of the twentieth century.

Today the assembly line is all too familiar; however, when introduced, it was innovative, promising, and threatening. The extraordinary response it provoked in the United States and Europe confirmed its importance. In numerous media accounts, it was pictured in glowing terms, but others saw a darker meaning that served as a warning for the future. It would eliminate jobs and work by automating manufacturing, and it would dehumanize workers as well. Andre Siegfried’s The United States Today (1927) contrasted the benefits of the assembly line with its unfavorable effects on labor. More notably, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) satirized the allegedly dehumanizing conditions of the assembly line.

Similarly, Europe had reservations about embracing the innovation. Most European countries had strong labor movements that naturally opposed an innovation that would threaten working-class livelihoods. Furthermore, as in the United States, working-class labor organizations were concerned with the dehumanizing effect that had by then become associated with the assembly line. More importantly, the various European countries did not have large enough domestic markets or tariff constraints to support the huge numbers of automobiles made possible by “Fordism.” This in itself did not completely shut down the [End Page 141] spread of the assembly line. Instead, what did take hold in Europe and, later, Japan were different ways of interpreting and integrating the assembly line.

By the 1920s and 1930s, the assembly line was viewed as uniquely American. It penetrated deep into our culture in a way that was inconceivable in Europe at the time. Nevertheless, it remained controversial, especially when put to the test by the Great Depression. The 1932 Dearborn Massacre exposed how deeply rooted in our culture Ford and by extension the assembly line had become. A protest by...

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