Week 6
Henry Ford 1863-1947
During the 1920s, the key industry was the auto industry. Henry Ford pioneered the moving assembly line, quadrupling productivity over a ten-year period, while keeping prices low (the Model T cost less than $300) and wages high. By 1925, Ford was manufacturing nine thousand cars per day. There were 26 million cars in the United States by 1929, one car on the road for every five Americans. Wilfred McCay: "Automobiles became to the economy of the 1920s, and much of the twentieth century, what textiles had been early in the previous century and what railroads had been after the Civil War: a centrally important industry that was not only a big business in its own right but also a powerful economic multiplier that gave rise to important by-products, including additional big businesses, subsidiary industries, and various other ripple effects through the economy. In the case of automobiles, the by-products were items like rubber, tires, spark plugs, glass paint, and, of course, the various petroleum products needed to operate an internal combustion engine—not to mention the extensive highway construction, some three hundred thousand miles of it between 1921 and 1919, to provide surfaces for those 26 million cars to travel on. And along with those new highways, there would be battalions of service stations.
RECOMMENDED READING
Reviews
“The implicit claim of Watts’s admirable book is almost inarguable – that it’s impossible to understand 20th-century America without knowing the story of Henry Ford.” –The New York Times
“Ford has had many biographers... None, however, comes close to Steven Watts... He brilliantly reveals the nature of Ford’s genius.” –Chicago Tribune
“Steven Watts attempts the most integrated understanding to date of Ford’s enormous influence and varied appeal... The fascinating result may change the way Henry Ford is remembered.” –San Francisco Chronicle