Henry Ford

Henry Ford was born on July 30, 1863, on a farm in Dearborn, Michigan, and showed early aptitude for mechanical tinkering. He worked as an engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit before founding the Ford Motor Company in 1903. The company's early success came from producing reliable, affordable automobiles, culminating in the Model T, introduced in 1908, which dominated the American market for nearly two decades.

Ford's most consequential innovation was the moving assembly line, introduced at the Highland Park plant in Michigan in 1913. Conveyor chains carried partially assembled vehicles to stationary workers, each of whom performed one or two repetitive operations as the chassis passed. The method reduced the time to assemble a Model T chassis from over twelve hours to roughly ninety minutes. Annual worker turnover at Highland Park reached three hundred and seventy percent in 1913, as workers fled the monotony. Ford responded on January 5, 1914, by announcing the five-dollar day, more than doubling the prevailing wage, with the condition that workers submit to home inspections by the Sociological Department.

In 1926, Ford adopted a five-day, forty-hour work week at Ford plants with no reduction in pay, providing a corporate precedent that other manufacturers gradually followed and that federal legislation would codify in 1938 and 1940. Ford's personal legacy is inseparable from his deep anti-Semitism. Between 1920 and 1927, his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, published a series of anti-Semitic articles later compiled as The International Jew, a text that was translated into multiple languages and praised by Adolf Hitler. Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from the Nazi government in 1938.

Ford died on April 7, 1947, at age eighty-three. His industrial methods became the template for mass production worldwide, and the term Fordism entered academic vocabulary to describe the system of standardized production, high wages, and mass consumption that defined the American economy through the mid-twentieth century. The Sociological Department was dissolved in the 1920s, but the underlying logic it represented, that employers might claim authority over workers' private lives as a condition of employment, recurred in different forms throughout the century.