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chapter two Henry Ford Ushers in a New Era for Black Workers I’m goin’ to get a job, Up there in Mr. Ford’s place, Stop these eatless days from starin’ Me in the face. —blind arthur blake, “Detroit Bound Blues” rumor had it that “workin’ in Mr. Ford’s place” in Detroit was the route to inclusion for African Americans in the modern industrial American economy. Henry Ford’s promise of a Five Dollar Day was not tainted with discrimination; blacks were paid a wage equal to that of whites. During the late teens, “the name Ford became synonymous with northern opportunity ,” recalled LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), inspiring hundreds of black southerners to travel North with their sights set on a job at the Ford Motor Company (fmc).¹ During the first years of the Great Migration, few blacks landed jobs at the fmc, for the company was slow to hire large numbers of African Americans. By 1919, however, Ford took the lead, taking on 1,700 African Americans, compared to 926 at Packard, second in black employment in the auto industry. Ford kept its lead and held it, as Herbert Northrup noted, coming “closer to job equality” than any large corporation and remaining in the vanguard in terms of equal hiring policies within the automotive industry until World War II.² Henry Ford embraced the idea of hiring large numbers of black workers as he came to terms with a host of problems threatening control over his automotive empire. By the end of World Word I in 1918, Ford’s Five Dollar Day, Profit-Sharing Plan was on shaky ground as labor turnover, which had been curbed substantially between 1914 and 1916, increased and labor productivity decreased. Wartime inflation eroded the value of Ford’s Five 40 henry ford ushers in a new era Dollar plan and the incentives it had created to alter worker behavior through conformity to the Americanization campaign. By the war’s end, a Ten Dollar Day would have had to be instituted to match the Five Dollar plan of 1914, but that was not forthcoming.³ In 1917 Vladimir Lenin’s Russian Revolution shook the world and with it Ford’s plan to create a new industrial worker to fit his new era. While Ford’s revolutionary Five Dollar Day demonstrated one way to make workers and management partners in profit sharing or shareholders in capitalism , Lenin’s plan did much the opposite. Not only did Lenin’s Soviet plan make workers and bosses enemies, but, more importantly, it was thought, it put control over production in the hands of labor, an idea that caught the attention of workers at the fmc. Feeling the tremors from the social upheaval thousands of miles away in the Soviet Union, Ford looked in new directions for model workers.⁴ At the same time, the war expanded federal government power over labor relations. In order to boost productivity, the government trotted out its own incentives, often promising “industrial democracy” and reminding workers “the People are the Government.”⁵ Such patriotic slogans may explain the increasingly repressive labor policies Ford put into place on the shop floor and the company’s surveillance of suspected dissident American and immigrant workers. While Ford’s wartime policies silenced some and put fear into others, they also breathed new life into unions. Many reports filed by Ford informers noted the increase in radical ideas and alliances with labor unions. The Ford network of spies was both extensive and thorough. Having contributed their labor and wages to make the world “safe for democracy,” some workers, Stephen Meyer writes, wanted to have a say in creating their vision of industrial democracy at the fmc.⁶ The optimistic spirit that drove the Five Dollar Day, Profit-Sharing Plan was gone by the end of the war, replaced with Ford’s frustration over how to move forward. His zeal for social engineering had not, however, withered on the vine. He had lost faith not in the model for his new era, merely in the means for getting there. No longer interested in changing the attitudes and behavior of his foreign-born workers, whose allegiance he regarded as questionable, Ford turned his attention to hiring African Americans. Along with the labor unrest that erupted in 1919, an economic downturn raised issues of labor efficiency and control, and concerns over just how the war had undermined his Americanization campaign for [18.217.220.114] Project MUSE (2024-04-24...

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