Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire by Elizabeth D. Esch (review)

The myth of Henry Ford as an enlightened capitalist is too useful to die. This myth posits Ford as tough minded enough to work his employees hard on the assembly line, but smart enough to see that, unless he paid them enough to buy the products they made, capitalism would be doomed. The liberal economist Robert Reich takes this view of Ford in Aftershock, his analysis of the American political economy in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008. (Such a generous reading of Ford makes sense in that Reich argues the central problem in American capitalism is the lack of purchasing power of the middle and working classes). It is also worth remembering that in 1914 the Wall Street Journal accused Ford of "economic blunders, if not crimes. They may return to plague him and the industry, as well as organized society."

Ford also portrayed himself as representing a modern and rational worldview. At a time when his Model T was the most popular car sold in the world, Ford argued that "a man on the assembly line in Detroit ought to be able to step into the assembly line of Oklahoma City or Sao Paolo, Brazil" (10). Elizabeth D. Esch, however, argues against this naive acceptance of manufacturing as a unifying or uniform process.

Esch reminds us that Ford offered the five-dollar day to stem his astronomical turnover. Rather than portraying Ford as a pluralist because he hired black and Mexican workers, Esch argues that Ford used high wages as bait to seduce immigrants into his nativist and racist version of Americanization. Esch finds that Ford was less a welfare capitalist than an empire builder, and his visions of the world were steeped in white nationalism. For Esch, Ford's imperial outlook and racial disparities were features, not glitches, of Ford in the United States and throughout the world.

Numerous writers saw Ford, or rather the system of Fordism that other companies and countries emulated, as a model of capitalism. Fordism sold workers on the mad logic of the factory, where engineers with stopwatches steadily ratcheted up the speed of the assembly line, with pay high enough to allow them to participate in the consumerist order made possible by industrialization. Marxists found that consumerism was central to capital's control over society. Esch quotes the communist thinker Antonio Gramsci, who wrote from one of Mussolini's prison cells that, in the United States, "hegemony was born in the factory and requires for its exercise only a minute quantity of professional and political and ideological intermediaries" (183).

Esch extends the first part of Gramsci's argument, buttressed by generations of labor historians' analysis of the workplace, to examine Ford's vision and practice throughout the world. (She argues strongly against the idea that few intermediaries were needed to maintain hegemony.) The workplace is critical to understanding how Ford remade men and women, as it made cars, in an effort to remake the world into a place where Ford's values could reign. Ford was a deeply racist and worldwide company, or rather empire, and Esch extends her analysis from the vast River Rouge complex in Detroit to Fordlandia in Brazil and Port Elizabeth in South Africa. Consequently, the book builds on, and extends, several decades of work by labor historians to analyze the workplace in as much detail as they can muster; and the ways that work and community were racialized from above and how the efforts from below were supported and amplified from above.

This is a work of sweeping breadth and audacity, which also goes into the ways managers sought to clarify the "contours of men-making in the service of car-making" and by extension, a vision of the world where workers were continually divided and in the grip of Anglo Saxon managers (186). As she writes...