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Bibliographical Essay
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223 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY I have identified and grouped here those primary and secondary works of greatest usefulness to my book and to any future research on the village industries. Save for a few, I do not evaluate their individual scholarly worth but rather accord all of them some basic scholarly significance. Among Henry Ford’s own writings, Ford and Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1922) and Today and Tomorrow (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1926), are the most useful for comments on the village industries. Ford’s usually worshipful contemporary biographers often mentioned the village industries but rarely devoted much space to them. An exception is Allan L. Benson, The New Henry Ford (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1923), chaps. 18, 19. For detailed statements by Ford and his official spokesmen regarding “decentralization ,” see Henry Ford and Samuel Crowther, “Management and Size,” Saturday Evening Post 203 (September 20, 1930): 24–25, 150, 153–54, 157; W. J. Cameron, “Decentralization of Industry,” Mechanical Engineering 59 (July 1937): 483–87; “Ford Aide Tells Rural Plant Gains: Cameron in Paper Written for Management Congress Urges Advantages to Employees,” Sunday New York Times, August 21, 1938, sec. 3, 7. Cameron’s paper was reprinted in Proceedings, Seventh International Management Congress, Production Section (Washington, D.C., 1938), 36–38. On the contemporary need for greater precision about decentralization in the context of technology, society, politics, and culture, see Langdon Winner, “Decentralization Clarified,” in Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 85–97. Representative extended interviews with Ford by leading contemporary journalists are Wilbur Forrest, “The Secret of an Interview with Henry Ford; Lucky Reporter Had Appearance of a Mechanic,” New York Herald Tribune, February 20, 1921, sec. 7, 1; Bruce Barton, “‘It Would Be Fun to Start Over Again,’ Said Henry Ford,” American Magazine 91 (April 1921): 7–9, 121–22, 124; Paul V. Kellogg, “The Play of a Big Man with a Little River, Part I,” Survey Graphic 52 (March 1, 1924): 637–42, 658, 661, 664, and “Part II” (April 1, 1924), 13–19, 52; 224 Bibliographical Essay Drew Pearson, “Ford Predicts the Passing of Big Cities and Decentralizing of Industry,” Motor World 80 (August 28, 1924): 9–11, also published as “Henry Ford Says Farmer-Workmen Will Build Automobile of the Future,” Automotive Industries, August 28, 1924, 389–92; Ida M. Tarbell, “Every Man a Trade and a Farm,” McCall’s 54 (July 1927): 5, 79–80; Harold N. Denny, “Times Good, Not Bad, Ford Says: Sees the Dawn of a Bright Future,” New York Times, February 1, 1933, 1, 3; Denny, “Small-Unit Plants Ford’s Final Goal,” New York Times, February 5, 1933, 1, 22; and Arthur Van Vlissingen, “The BIG Idea behind Those SMALL Plants of Ford’s,” Factory Management and Maintenance 96 (April 1938): 46–48, 50, reprinted as “Ford’s Little Plants in the Country,” Reader’s Digest 32 (July 1938): 62–64. Given the considerable circulation and importance of the two publications in which they appeared, it is likely that “America’s Ruggedest Individual Takes a $35,000,000 Crack at Depression,” Life 4 (May 30, 1938): 9–13, and John Bird, “One Foot on the Land,” Saturday Evening Post 216 (March 18, 1944): 12–13, 46, 48, brought the village industries to the attention of thousands of readers throughout America and elsewhere. On the need to take seriously Ford’s ideas and writings (despite their frequently having been articulated by Crowther), see Martha Banta, Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and Gib Prettyman, “Criticism, Business, and the Problem of Complicity: The Case of Henry Ford,” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory 2 (fall 2000): 49–66. In addition, Reynold M. Wik, Henry Ford and Grass-roots America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), remains a first-rate analysis of Ford’s persistent ideological appeal to rural America. On Ford and history, see Roger Burlingame, Henry Ford (New York: Knopf, 1954), 85, 95–96; William Greenleaf, From These Beginnings: The Early Philanthropies of Henry and Edsel Ford, 1911–1936 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964), chap. 3; Roger Butterfield, “Henry Ford, the Wayside Inn, and the Problem of ‘History Is Bunk,’” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 77 (1965): 57–66; Henry Ford...