In this book Mark Rupert argues that American global power was shaped by the ways in which mass production was institutionalized in the USA, and by the political and ideological struggles integral to this process. The production of an unprecedented volume of goods propelled the United States to the apex of the global division of labor, ensuring victory in World War II and enabling postwar reconstruction under American leadership. He describes an 'historic bloc' of American statesmen, capitalists and labor leaders who fostered a productivity-oriented political consensus within the USA, and sought to generalize their vision of liberal capitalism around the globe. He focuses on the incorporation of industrial labor as a junior partner in this hegemonic bloc, and argues that the recent erosion of its position under the pressures of transnational competition and the political forces of right wing reaction may open up new possibilities for transformative politics.

In 1903, Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company in a small Detroit workshop. Five years later, he introduced the Model T and met with extraordinary commercial success. Between 1910 and 1914, he developed mass production and made the conveyor a symbol of the auto-industrial age. Then, in 1914, Ford acquired an overnight reputation as humanitarian, philanthropist and social reformer; and simultaneously infuriated the business community and stunned social reformers with his announcement of the outrageous Five Dollar Day. More than simply high-wage policy, the Five Dollar Day attempted to solve attitudinal and behavioral problems with an effort to change the worker’s domestic environment. Half of the five dollars represented “wages” and the other half was called “profits”—which the worker received only when he met specific standards of efficiency and home life that accorded with the ideal of an American way of life which the company felt was the basis for industrial efficiency. The unique and short-lived Ford program did not succeed, yet its significance as an early managerial strategy goes beyond the boundaries of success or failure. The Ford Motor Company was uniquely situated in the historical evolution of labor management and industrial technology, and this readable study of that evolution, which highlights the Ford workers, is a chapter in the larger history of labor and work in America. Stephen Meyer III, Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, is one of the new historians who have begun to address the profound social impact of technology on the world of work.

How a Michigan farm boy became the richest man in America is a classic, almost mythic tale, but never before has Henry Ford’s outsized genius been brought to life so vividly as it is in this engaging and superbly researched biography. The real Henry Ford was a tangle of contradictions. He set off the consumer revolution by producing a car affordable to the masses, all the while lamenting the moral toll exacted by consumerism. He believed in giving his workers a living wage, though he was entirely opposed to union labor. He had a warm and loving relationship with his wife, but sired a son with another woman. A rabid anti-Semite, he nonetheless embraced African American workers in the era of Jim Crow. Uncovering the man behind the myth, situating his achievements and their attendant controversies firmly within the context of early twentieth-century America, Watts has given us a comprehensive, illuminating, and fascinating biography of one of America’s first mass-culture celebrities.