Recasting the Machine Age: Henry Ford's Village Industries by Howard P. Segal

Abstract

Book Reviews 147 Roberts ably weaves together McGregor's personal, corporate, and civic lives to create a vivid portrait of the man and his place within the modernizing yet still rough-and-tumble Windsor-Detroit area and the rapidly expanding Ford empire. Some elements of McGregor's times, such as the complex relationship between labor and capital and problems of race relations (including Henry Ford's anti-Semitism), while covered competendy, could have been contextualized more effectively; but Roberts has captured the essence of McGregor's accomplishments. This is an achievement, given that, again unlike many other business biographies, In the Shadow of Detroit does not rest upon a treasure trove of sources. McGregor did not leave a large collection of private papers, and the bulk of his company's records have long since disappeared. Nonetheless, the reader does get a sense of McGregor's reach, as he and Ford Canada reshaped Windsor and Canada, and spread Ford's wares throughout the world via Canada's British connections. The author is to be commended both for searching through amultitude of local records and news sources, and for his careful handling of the overdy partisan Windsor newspapers' treatment of McGregor. This book is different also because Roberts did not just write a biography: he wrote the story of a distinctive transborder region. This section of In the Shadow of Detroit is useful in understanding the imperialistic phase of Michigan history, when its auto industry rapidly and profoundly shaped virtually every aspect of North American life. Windsor became a special place?the first foreign outpost of Henry Ford's empire?and one that took on a particular Canadian-American personality. Like all imperial outposts, Ford Canada and its founder both reveled in, and sometimes chafed against, their master's embrace. Roberts has vividly shown that McGregor was a capable centurion in Ford's fascinating Motoropolis. Dimitry Anastakis Trent University, Peterborough Ontario, Canada Howard P. Segal. Recasting the Machine Age: Henry Ford's Village Industries. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. Pp. 244. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth, $34.95. In Recasting theMachine Age, Howard P. Segal explores Henry Ford's ideas about the decentralizing of production in the early twentieth century. Ford believed that centralized production had 148 Michigan Historical Review become expensive because it created many social ills. Accordingly, Ford relocated a portion of his company's production to several rural Michigan sites, which afforded the company two benefits: lower overhead and an opportunity for Ford to implement cultural values that were dear to his heart. Positioning the Ford debate outside of its traditional setting?urban America?Segal offers historians a chance to examine corporate America's shift of industrial manufacturing from urban cores to the countryside. Segal begins with a discussion of Ford's "village industries." Designed as small-scale, widely dispersed factories, they were an effort to decentralize production within Ford's industrial empire. Segal concludes that the results of this initiative were mixed at best, but he notes that Henry Ford's personal opinions about proper living and working arrangements played an important role in this process. The same paternalistic trend was evident at Ford's rural industrial sites as at his urban factories. Ford believed that moving production away from congested cities yielded greater profits and made for a healthier and happier work environment. Employing the latest technology, village industries proved to be efficient production facilities that provided local townspeople with employment and generally improved the surrounding area's infrastructure. Segal's later chapters examine workers' experiences in village industries. He compares "village" workers to their urban counterparts and finds that the former were different. Work in Ford's village industries took on a familial character; many employees claimed that they "felt like a family" (p. 62). Segal argues that village industries provided a vision of "a new social order inAmerica" (p. 155). Ford welcomed modern technology as a fact of life and, through his rural production facilities, offered a means of accommodating it to his notion of middle-class respectability. The motives behind Ford's establishment of village industries were not solely economic; while he sought to lower his operating costs, Ford was also attempting to...