... of Automobiles... and Politics
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commentary by
Michael L. Bromley |
Bromleyisms
... of Automobiles
... and Politics
...and of history, of society, and a whole lot more.
| he, he... |
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Pages: |
Automotive Book Reviews
Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress
Brinkley reasons the need for this work because,
He ought have stuck to the latter reason, which was reason enough. As he admits earlier in the paragraph,
So, really, what are we doing here in 800 pages -- saving time? A good, fresh inventory of Ford's one hundred years is all very well, but to excuse it we've got to have something new. All we get from Brinkley is different -- and not new. Stick with Nevins. When I was asked by the publisher to review the book I took to it eagerly. What fun! I thought. All too soon I realized that I'd better hold my tongue. I never sent out a formal review. I should like to say a few words, finally, and I'll do it here so as to be fully responsible for it. Here you go: Brinkley is a sycophant. His sad affair last year as John Kerry's official biographer was not a fluke. In "Wheels" he did the same for Billy Ford -- uh, 'xcuse moi, William Clay Ford, Jr. -- the boy genius who's overseeing the Ford Company's ride into 21st century environmentalism, hybrids (?), and lost market share. After slogging through this exasperating account, all I can say is that the book is but a confessional for the nasty sides of Henry Ford written on Billy's and his family's behalf. We get all of Henry's ego, his antisemitism, all the labor fights, all the cruelty to Henry's son Edsel, and on into the overblown saga of Lee Iacocca and the Mustang, which, if you believe Brinkley, was as great an automobile as the Model T. And we get waaaaaaya too much of Walter Reuther and his labor movement -- and a magnificent whitewash of Reuther's communism, a label Brinkley protests with vigor -- so much that the guilt more than tinges the defense. Reuther certainly was pink -- the question for his defenders is not if, but when. The old boy, who as a mechanic in Detroit in the 1920s made $8 - $10 a day, wages well above what he negotiated from GM in the "sit-down" strikes of 1937, spent two years working in an auto factory in the USSR. But, no matter, says Brinkley, he was just a socialist. Whatever the degree of pink, Reuther's career was built on expediency. When communism served him, he was pink. When the New Deal went to labor, he was an FDR man. Come the Red Scare, he was all Red, White and Blue. The problem for Brinkley is that he excuses Reuther as just a socialist. The claim would be laughable if it weren't so pathetic, as if it's any better to say that the girl's not a prostitute, she's just a whore. Take any politically-correct position and it's heroic in Brinkley's account. Take anything selfish, anything unkind of labor or Reuther or of FDR and Brinkley has for you a mean dog. That's why, whereas in Nevin's book Ford's 1914 Five-Dollar-A-Day wage hike was an act of business cunning, by Brinkley's view it was social awareness, with credit going to partner James Couzens and not to Henry Ford (and, as Brinkley admits, as against the testimony of a key actor in it Charles Sorensen, who said it was he and Ford who conceived it). To get there, Brinkley goes to Ida Tarbell, the muckraking progressive who, in an unpublished manuscript, claimed that Couzens came up with the idea after reading a socialist magazine which published a letter demanding that the magazine publisher walk the walk of labor reform and pay its own workers more. To get there you gotta believe that socialists Mary Jones and Jack London have the final say on the meaning of 1914. Only if we listen to them can we begin to consider Brinkley's claim that,
First of all, there was no "smoldering class warfare" in the automobile business in the early 1910s. It's a specious, back-built claim to justify the author's later conclusions. Car factories were job-mecca, and not just at Ford Motor. Workers flooded to this exciting, dynamic (and non-unionized) business, which was just then capturing the nation. There was essentially no labor unrest -- except at Ford, whose growth in 1912/13 was out-of-control, and in implementing the production line faced near devastating worker turnover. His problem was not the IWW "Wobblies," who managed a brief and entirely meaningless disruption at the Studebaker works. Ford's problem was in the orderly work place, and not with the syndicate. Hell, no union would have dared ask for five bucks a day! Ford, who loved the dramatic and, of course, highly profitable publicity in it, cut short both worker turnover and unionism.** Brinkley claims that had Ford not launched the Five Dollar plan, he would be but another Chrysler, Dodge, or Sloan, "a hazy historical figure" known for some car model named 'T.'* You see, there just had to be some social good in it, and that social good was what made it great, not its principal effect, greater efficiency in building more and more cars at lower and lower prices. Brinkley elevates the Five Dollar Day above the Model T itself, for the higher wage -- which was not available to all Ford workers, btw -- carried unvarnished social good whereas, of course, the automobile, the T or any other, has, like Ford, an ugly side. And so on throughout the book. Perhaps "Wheels" is exasperating to me because I know too much about the subject. An uncritical read of it will likely be informative and, even, enjoyable. But if you do it, do it with care, for you're gonna get a full-on, in-the-face smack of leftist history, and entirely absent of self-awareness.
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