Boys and Their Toys: The Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild, 1930–1968, and the Making of a Male Technical Domain

Abstract

Boys and Their Toys: The Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild, 1930-1968, and the Making of a Male Technical Domain RUTH OLDENZIEL In 1931, an advertisement for the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild in National Geographic invited teenage boys to participate in a model­ making contest. It showed a boy offering a girl a miniature version of a “Napoleonic Coach”—an image that had been chosen as the emblem of the Fisher Body Company in 1922 to convey luxury, com­ fort, and style. The emblem had been modeled on the coaches Na­ poleon I of France used for his wedding and for his coronation as emperor. Fisher Body, the organizer of the guild, was the world’s largest manufacturer of automobile bodies, which it supplied princi­ pally to General Motors. The Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild aimed to train “the coming generation” and to secure “fine craftsman­ ship” (fig. 1). Intended to appeal to boys of high school and college ages between 12 and 20, the ad portrays the “Fisher boy” as fatherly: mature and responsible, ready to take a bride—a far cry from the boisterous bachelor or daredevil hot-rodder. Opposite the Fisher boy stands a girl, positioned as the passive and grateful but critical recipient of his Napoleonic Coach and suggesting the kind of fu­ ture that such a gift seems to promise. The illustration implies that the Fisher boy is not only a builder of coaches, but also a builder of families and security as a future husband and bread­ winner. The Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild (1930-68), the organization Dr. Oi.denz.ikl is associate professor at the Belle van Zuylen Institute, University of Amsterdam and the author of Engendering Engineering (forthcoming). She is in­ debted toJohnJacobus, Roger W. White (curator, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History), and AmyJames (archivist, GM Media Archives) for making various primary documents available to her, and to Eileen Boris, John Staudenmaier, and Robert Post for careful and insightful readings of earlier drafts of this article. She thanks Nina Lerman and Arwen Mohun for ongoing conversa­ tions on the subject.© 1997 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/97/3801-0008S01.00 60 V_/housands of boys all over America are completing miniature model Napoleonic coaches in the first year’s activity of the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild. These models they will shortly submit in a nationwide competition for four university scholar­ ships of four years each, 98 trips to Detroit, and 882 other valuable awards. The Fisher Body Corporation sponsored this inspiring move­ ment, believing that this exercise of creative talent, this quickening of the hand of youth, are essential steps toward the development of high ideals— that only by training the coming genera­ tion can fine craftsmanship be perpetu­ ated and superior coachcraft be assured. CADILLAC * LA SALLE * BUICK v OAKLAND OLDSMOBILE v PONTIAC > CHEVROLET Fig. 1.—“Fisher Boy Offers Girl His Napoleonic Coach,” National Geographic,June 1931. This advertisement for the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild portrays a boy be­ tween the ages of 12 and 20, of eligible age for the contest. (From the Collections of Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village, neg. 91.303.2027.) 62 Ruth Oldenziel that sponsored the ad, marks one of the most playful by-products of the very successful partnership between Fisher and cosponsor Gen­ eral Motors (GM). At first glance, the guild invites us to view the world of boys’ toys hidden in attics, basements, barns, and backyards as whimsical, playful, and innocent, but a second reading reveals an intricate web of institutions that defined and maintained a male technical domain. The fascinating but now-forgotten history of the guild suggests that the definition and production of male technical knowledge involved an extraordinary mobilization oforganizational, economic, and cultural resources.1 The guild, “an educational foun­ dation devoted to the development of handiwork and craftsman­ ship,” directly appealed to boys and relied for recruiting on the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, and the public school system.2 Girls found them­ selves excluded as a matter of course. This explicitly male technical domain came into existence at pre­ cisely the same time that “the...