Segal book explores Henry Ford’s ‘village industries’

ORONO – History often paints industrialist Henry Ford as the pioneer of highly centralized mass-production in auto manufacturing. A new book by University of Maine history professor Howard Segal, however, explores the automobile magnate’s desired decentralization of his production operations, as represented by Ford’s 19 “village industries” outside Detroit.

“Recasting the Machine Age: Henry Ford’s Village Industries” recounts the history of Ford’s efforts to shift the production of Ford cars and trucks from the large-scale factories he had built in the Detroit area to 19 small-scale plants within 60 miles of Ford headquarters in Dearborn, Mich. The visionary who had become famous in the early 20th century for his huge and technologically advanced Highland Park and River Rouge complexes gradually changed his focus beginning in the late 1910s and continued until his death in 1947.

Segal will discuss his book at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 27, at the Page Farm and Home Museum on the UMaine campus.

Although the Rouge plant was a huge complex that was still winning him enormous fame and fortune, Ford became less obsessed with bringing raw materials such as iron ore from the Great Lakes into one end of the complex and producing finished cars and trucks at the other.

The different village industries were integrally important to Ford’s overall operation, Segal observes, as each plant often would be the exclusive manufacturer of a specific part for the company’s vehicles. While Ford may well have been motivated to spend great sums of money on village industries in part to prevent unionization at his company, these industrial experiments represented much more than “union busting,” said Segal, who first visited Ford’s village industry sites in the early 1980s while teaching the history of technology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Village industries were significant examples of profound social, cultural and ideological shifts in America between the world wars that were not limited to this one notable industrialist, according to Segal. But unlike most others seeking alternatives to large-scale and heavily centralized operations, Ford alone had the money to effect his scheme, which he wished to duplicate elsewhere in America but never did.

Segal’s book chronicles the development of the plants, their fate after Ford’s death, their recent revival as part of Michigan’s renewed appreciation of its industrial heritage, and their connections to contemporary efforts to decentralize high-tech working and living arrangements.

Although Ford imagined that the rural setting of these decentralized plants would allow workers to become part-time farmers, his plan did not represent a reaction against modern technology. Instead, the idea was to continue to employ the latest technology, but on a much smaller scale. For the most part, it worked. All 19 of the village industries helped save their communities from decline before and during the Great Depression. The majority of workers in the village industries, moreover, appear to have preferred their working and living conditions to those in Detroit and Dearborn.

Segal became interested in why Ford became so invested, financially and psychologically, in a new model of small-scale industrial production as represented by the village industries, while researching Henry Ford at the Ford Archives in Dearborn.

“In the last part of my book I draw many parallels between Ford’s plans and those of others – such as [“Living the Good Life” authors] Scott and Helen Nearing of Vermont and Maine – in seeking a medium between technological advance and other aspects of ‘the good life,'” he said. “I also draw many parallels between Ford’s plans and those of decentralization schemes generated by high-tech developments and living and working at home or making large-scale projects into smaller-scale ones, as in Maine.”

“Recasting the Machine Age,” published by University of Massachusetts Press, is available at $34.95. The book jacket may be seen at www.umass.edu/umpress/fall04/segal.html.