One Summer: America, 1927

production line.
    Henry Ford was always happy to take credit for the invention of the assembly line process, but it seems he may have been generous to himself. ‘Henry Ford had no ideas on mass production,’ Ford’s colleague Charles Sorensen once recalled. ‘Far from it; he just grew into it like the rest of us.’
     
    Thanks to the slickness of operations, the time it took to produce a Ford car fell from twelve hours in 1908 (which was already goodgoing) to just one hour and a half after 1913 when the company’s Highland Park factory opened. At the peak of production, a new car, truck or tractor rolled off a Ford assembly line somewhere in America every ten seconds. By 1913, the company had sales of nearly $100 million and profits of $27 million. With the greater efficiencies costs fell, too – from $850 in 1908 to $500 in 1913 and down to $390 in 1914 before finally settling at an almost preposterously reasonable $260 by 1927.
    In 1914, Ford introduced an eight-hour day, forty-hour week and doubled average salaries to $5 a day in what is often presented as an act of revolutionary magnanimity. In fact, it was necessitated by the costly waste of high employee turnover – a breathtaking 370 per cent in 1913. At the same time, Ford established its notorious Sociological Department, employing some two hundred investigators who were empowered to look into every aspect of employees’ private lives – their diet, hygiene, religion, personal finances, recreational habits and morals. Ford’s workforce was full of immigrants – in some periods as many as two thirds of his employees were from abroad – and Ford genuinely wished to help them live healthier, more satisfying lives, so his sociological meddling was by no means entirely a bad thing. However, there was almost nothing Henry Ford did that didn’t have some bad in it somewhere, and the Sociological Department certainly had a totalitarian tinge. Ford employees could be ordered to clean their houses, tidy their yards, sleep in American-style beds, increase their savings, modify their sexual behaviour, and otherwise abandon any practice that a Ford inspector deemed ‘derogatory to good physical manhood or moral character’. Foreign-born workers who wished to advance within the company were required to take citizenship and language classes.
    Ford also, it must be said, employed a great many disabled people – including (in 1919) one man who had no hands, four who had no legs or feet, four who were blind, thirty-seven who were deaf and sixty who had epilepsy (at a time when epileptics were scorned). He also employed between 400 and 600 ex-convicts. Fordalso hired black men, though he nearly always gave them the hottest, dirtiest and most exhausting jobs. (Black women in 1927 were never hired.)
    Who deserves the credit for Ford’s success has been a matter of dispute since that success began. Many have suggested that the real brains of the operation was James Couzens, Ford’s Canadian-born partner. Couzens had started his working life as a clerk in a coal yard, but joined Ford early on and showed an extraordinary flair for business. Couzens set up and managed Ford’s finances, sales, distribution network and advertising. Henry Ford attended almost exclusively to production. By this view, Henry Ford gave the company a name and an ethos, but Couzens made it a global colossus.
    Ford and Couzens constantly squabbled, sometimes bitterly, and success only made matters worse. Ford began to resent Couzens’s $150,000 salary, particularly after he worked out that it added 50 cents to the cost of every car they built. He didn’t think Couzens was worth it and essentially drove him to leave. Couzens sold out in 1915 and went into politics, eventually becoming a US senator for Michigan where he made himself famous by attacking Andrew Mellon for favouring the rich (an irony appreciated by many, since Couzens was believed to be the wealthiest man in Congress).
    Couzens’s departure was a source of immediate worry for many. ‘There was something of a feeling that while Ford was a great mechanic he wasn’t much of a businessman,’ a Ford insider named E. G. Pipp wrote in 1926, ‘and there were fears of what would happen to the company if Couzens left.’ What happened in fact isn’t certain. Without Couzens, Ford carried on much as before. Though it did go into a gradual decline, it is impossible to say to what extent that was a reflection of Couzens’s