Henry Ford's Plan for the American Suburb
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Henry Ford's Plan for the American Suburb

Dearborn and Detroit

Heather Barrow

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Henry Ford's Plan for the American Suburb

Dearborn and Detroit

Heather Barrow

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Around Detroit, suburbanization was led by Henry Ford, who not only located a massive factory over the city's border in Dearborn, but also was the first industrialist to make the automobile a mass consumer item. So, suburbanization in the 1920s was spurred simultaneously by the migration of the automobile industry and the mobility of automobile users. A welfare capitalist, Ford was a leader on many fronts—he raised wages, increased leisure time, and transformed workers into consumers, and he was the most effective at making suburbs an intrinsic part of American life. The decade was dominated by this new political economy—also known as "Fordism"—linking mass production and consumption. The rise of Dearborn demonstrated that Fordism was connected to mass suburbanization as well.

Ultimately, Dearborn proved to be a model that was repeated throughout the nation, as people of all classes relocated to suburbs, shifting away from central cities. Mass suburbanization was a national phenomenon. Yet the example of Detroit is an important baseline since the trend was more discernable there than elsewhere. Suburbanization, however, was never a simple matter of outlying communities growing in parallel with cities. Instead, resources were diverted from central cities as they were transferred to the suburbs. The example of the Detroit metropolis asks whether the mass suburbanization which originated there represented the "American dream, " and if so, by whom and at what cost. This book will appeal to those interested in cities and suburbs, American studies, technology and society, political economy, working-class culture, welfare state systems, transportation, race relations, and business management.

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1
The Urban Plans of Henry Ford
Ford and Suburbanization
Henry Ford possessed a unique ability to connect culture and technology; after all, it is difficult to imagine another individual who was able to influence such a great number of people with the invention of a single mass-produced consumer product.1 Up to the point when the Model T was conceived, the automobile was merely a form of recreation for the affluent, a luxury that provided convenience and entertainment. Only after Ford reinterpreted the automobile as something within the reach of average people did it become an everyday necessity and bring about a transportation revolution. Although competitor automakers soon copied Ford Motor Company’s dissemination of an affordable and easy-to-maintain car for daily use, no other maker retained a dominant market share in such a steady streak throughout the 1910s and early 1920s. An immediate impact of the mass-produced automobile was a dramatic transformation of the national landscape, with radiating urban growth following newly accessible corridors that led out of central cities.2 Yet, little has been written on how Henry Ford himself viewed this upending turn of events. As it happens, he was a strong supporter of the rise of suburbanization brought in on the tide of spreading automobile use. To some extent, he actually seems to have intended this new kind of urban development.3
The unstoppable quality of Henry Ford continues to generate interest in his defining impact on American society.4 Some of Ford’s influence can be attributed to his unusual personality and lively imagination, which made him someone who could identify and predict trends and then drive the bandwagon to make them widespread. Also to be considered, however, was the degree to which Henry Ford, the man, was conflated with Ford Motor Company, the firm he founded.5 Ford Motor Company was essentially a family business, a model more typical of the nineteenth century than of the twentieth. In this personality-driven environment, the values and beliefs of Henry Ford mattered as much as any business acumen, and to some extent, he wanted his company to be an instrument of social change, which was somewhat odd compared to other automakers. Really, there was no one within the firm to oppose him on this—he was a majority stockholder, and besides, the company was wildly profitable, making him one of the richest and most influential men in the country, if not the world. Despite his high status, he remained something of an Everyman, and the fact that we are still quoting him today proves what a hold he had on the nation’s psyche (as did Mark Twain or Benjamin Franklin). Given this folksy vein of his, it seems only natural that he concerned himself not only with the best mode of transportation for everyone but also with what kind of homes they inhabited—looking far beyond his own workers to see how every American should live.6
Just as Henry Ford wanted to make a “car for the multitude,” he also intended to create a suburb for the multitude. Indirectly, he was already accomplishing this through the transportation revolution he himself had set into motion, which brought about swift urban change throughout the United States. In a much more literal way, he created suburbanization firsthand by relocating his industrial headquarters from Detroit to the outskirts of the city, in a location that would become Dearborn, Michigan. Additionally, Ford promoted this new site by commissioning a model subdivision called the Ford Homes. Also, he had at his disposal the deployment of company policies to motivate employees who needed aid in buying houses and cars. Within a single decade (the 1920s), Dearborn grew from a population of 5,000 to ten times that number, with automobile workers soon constituting half of all employed residents.7 Dearborn embodied a rising trend of the times—suburbs that sheltered upwardly mobile, working-class people who could newly afford to own houses and cars. In the end, Henry Ford was singularly responsible for promoting suburban development in the Detroit area, ultimately setting an example for a nation of people adopting the automobile who wished to relocate outside of central cities. One reason Ford could do this was his ability to spread ideas through the many channels of communication under his control, some of which attained circulation throughout the country, like the Dearborn Independent.8 For example, this newspaper featured an ongoing series about the Ford Homes, presumably inspiring its audience to create a like-minded community.
Of course, Henry Ford—however powerful—was not alone in transforming Dearborn into a model suburb. As a major landowner and the single largest taxpayer, he likely had the elected officials in his vest pocket, who must have been complicit in his plan. He also had the help, wittingly or not, of private developers and anyone else in the real estate business as well as bureaucrats with oversight for zoning and other regulation whose interests coincided with his. After all, most of Dearborn grew in a conventional way, with dozens of developers building out entire subdivisions on a speculative basis, selling hundreds of individual houses to prospective homeowners. Government regulation of this development was provided by ordinances typical of the time, intended to preserve property values. In this sense, Dearborn was a rather ordinary community—the product of market forces—that orchestrated the supply and demand for residential development. Here, the Ford Homes subdivision developed by Ford Motor Company on a speculative basis for sale to employees was part of the larger pattern and subject to the same process of development as the rest of Dearborn.9
This is where Henry Ford diverged from the industrial titans of the past, taking on a much more modest role than the monopolists who founded self-contained company towns owned entirely by a single corporation. Dearborn was the exception rather than the rule because so little of its residential area was directly under the influence of the automaker. Ford’s responsibility in creating a suburb for the masses was primarily conceptual; although taking the step to build the Ford Homes was crucial to the realization of Dearborn as a community, he left it mostly to others to implement his idea.
In the end, Henry Ford’s influence on urban development, after widening for so many years, was constrained by changing times. At his peak, Ford was able to offer high wages, on an unprecedented scale, to his workers, which made it possible for them to afford the suburbs. With the onset of the Great Depression, however, the role of a single individual in assuring a basic standard of living for an enormous number of people was curtailed by economic uncertainty, which brought chaos to every level of society. Ford’s ability to promote suburbs for the masses, in Dearborn and throughout the nation, simply could not ride out a downturn this precipitous, and his efforts were halted for a time. Ultimately, recovery was brought about through the rise of unionization and a greater role for big government. Of course, Fordism—the linking of mass production and mass consumption—was slowed down only temporarily, and it was far from disappearing as the century reached its midpoint and the country entered into postwar expansion. This system remained the foundation for the economy, but now it was buttressed by union demands for high wages and government provision of entitlements. The success of this new system was evident in the elevated standard of living for the average worker, who continued to achieve a suburban lifestyle. Henry Ford himself did not live to witness these lasting changes, as he died in 1947. Yet it is clear in retrospect that he was committed to promoting a rising suburban trend for all classes, and this study will argue that those effects were still evident long after his death.
The Move to Metropolitanism
When Dearborn mushroomed in growth during the 1920s, it necessarily impacted the destiny of Detroit. For many inevitable reasons, cities and their suburbs exist in a state of dynamic tension; one would not exist without the other. Suburbs get their start as the offspring of the urban center—as the result of increased congestion that pushes the population to the outskirts where land is more available and often cheaper. By their very nature, suburbs rarely attain self-sufficiency: they are usually lacking in a strong tax base, high assessed valuation, major employers, or qualified labor pool, and sometimes they are missing key infrastructure components and valuable natural resources. Cities, although more independent because of their concentration of population and geographic advantages, are nonetheless reliant upon their suburbs. For instance, suburbs that function as bedroom communities supply the city with a labor pool commuting to work. The popularity of annexation—in which bordering suburbs are incorporated into the central city—illustrates how attractive the additional tax base and voter population of a desirable suburb might be.
Here, the relationship of Dearborn and Detroit is a case in point. When Dearborn leaped to a population of 50,000 from only 5,000 within a single decade, its pace of growth needs to be compared to that of the central city. Detroit, after all, had become one of the biggest cities in the nation. By 1920, it had a population of close to one million residents, and from then until 1940, it was ranked as the country’s fourth-largest city.10 In other words, Detroit was still expanding during the same period that Dearborn was doing the same. However, an important difference to be noted is that the rate of growth for Detroit was being outpaced by that of Dearborn—its multiplier was far less than the factor of ten experienced by its suburb. In fact, this was becoming a nationwide trend within major metropolitan areas: suburban population in these places surged by a third while the population of central cities expanded by only a quarter.11
This trend is the reason this study takes on a wide lens, pulling within its view both Dearborn and Detroit, to look fully at the impact of Henry Ford’s urban policies. It is difficult to study Dearborn in isolation during the 1920s, since many Ford Motor Company workers at its factory commuted there from Detroit and from other suburbs. Some of these wage earners were displaced from employment at the Ford Motor Company facility in Highland Park, which was gradually decommissioned. Many automobile workers still lived near their first plant, even if they no longer worked there, and then commuted to Dearborn. Almost all African American workers commuted in from segregated communities elsewhere, as discrimination barred them from living in Dearborn. The dispersion of workers who lived throughout the Detroit metropolis eventually spurred Henry Ford to consider an addition to the region’s mass transit system, proposing a new streetcar line in order to facilitate the commute into Dearborn. With the Great Depression, many workers who lost jobs at the Ford Motor Company but still lived in Detroit became a disproportionate burden on the social services of the central city. After all, Detroit could not levy taxes upon the auto company because it lay outside the city’s tax base. So the central city was in competition with its biggest suburb, as they struggled over how to provide a safety net to citizens without a united tax base to provide adequate revenues. These are just a few examples of the need to address urban history with an approach based on “metropolitanism.”12
Fordist and Post-Fordist Cities
In many ways, Henry Ford perfected the concept of vertical integration. This was a centralization, under one roof, of numerous manufacturing steps that had previ...

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