Recasting The Machine Age: Henry Ford’s Village Industries: Howard P. Segal
Editorial Reviews
Review
“”Among the book’s strongest parts is a short chapter dedicated to labor history, in which Segal draws upon his own interviews with former employees of the village industry.” — Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Winter 2007
“Howard segal’s treatment of his subject is the best I have read, going far beyond anyone else’s work and being as defintive as we likely shall see. Recasting the Machine Age is fair, objective, scholarly, and up-to-date.”
“Recasting the Machine Age” makes two important contributions to the literature: a solid history of Ford’s fascinating village industries and a sophisticated analysis of the history of decentralization in American history….Both of these interrelated–but non-Fordist–issues can be traced directly to Henry Ford. — History: Reviews of New Books, Winter 2006
"(T)his important and thought-provoking book encourages us to reflect on the possibilities for creating such a world by reassessing our presuppositions about mass production and the paths of modernity." — Technology and Culture, October 2006
"This carefully written, thoroughly documented book combines extensive archival sources with broad coverage of the secondary literature. It goes beyond the specifics of the village industries to provide a window on the social, economic, and political debates of the interwar period as they related to technology, or as segal refers to it, the ‘machine age.’ Historians, sociologists, geographers, economists, and political scientists who want an overview of that period from the persepctive of technology, which segal has covered in other fine works on the subject, will gain insights from this book." — The Historian, Vol. 69, No. 2
Howard P. Segal has written an important book that extends the scholarship of both the history of technology in America as well as its utopian ideals. — H-Net, Rob Vaughan, March 2007
Segal has written a thoughtful analysis of decentralization in the machine age. — Journal of American History, June 2006
“Recasting the Machine Age” recounts the history of Henry Ford’s efforts to shift the production of Ford cars and trucks from the large-scale factories he had pioneered in the Detroit area to nineteen decentralized, small-scale plants within sixty miles of Ford headquarters in Dearborn. The visionary who had become famous in the early twentieth century for his huge and technologically advanced Highland Park and River Rouge complexes gradually changed his focus beginning in the late 1910s and continuing until his death in 1947.
According to Howard P. Segal, Ford decided to create a series of “village industries,” each of which would manufacture one or two parts for the company’s vehicles. Although he imagined that the rural setting of these decentralized plants would allow workers to become part-time farmers, Ford’s plan did not represent a reaction against modern technology. The idea was to continue to employ the latest technology, but on a much smaller scale–and for the most part it worked. All nineteen of these village industries helped save their communities from decline, in several cases ensuring their survival through 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.
Ford may well have been motivated to spend great sums on the village industries in part to prevent the unionization of his company. But these industrial experiments represented much more than “union busting.” They were significant examples of profound social, cultural, and ideological shifts in America between the World Wars as reflected in the thought and practice of one notable industrialist. Segal recounts 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.
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