Toward the end of the 1920s, more and more workers from Henry Ford’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, could hop in their cars and drive to homes spread throughout Greater Detroit. There, thanks to relatively high wages, they could look forward to a meal cooked with the latest appliances in a dining room furnished in accordance with the latest trends. The next day they awoke and began their shifts again. Ninety-eight thousand workers, black and white, immigrant and native-born, mostly men but some women, all converged on the vast suburban headquarters of the Ford Motor Company.
This was the Detroit Henry Ford made according to Heather Barrow’s new book, Henry Ford’s Plan for the American Suburb: Dearborn and Detroit. Barrow argues that Henry Ford set in motion mass suburbanization in the United States when he relocated his company’s operations to Dearborn in 1917. In doing so, he also set in motion the urban crisis that decimated Detroit toward the end of the twentieth century. Ford conducted business under two guiding principles: vertical integration, which centralized operations in the River Rouge plant, and Fordism, the linking of mass production to mass consumption with high wages. Both facilitated decentralized residential and industrial patterns that deprived cities of their tax base. Ford grew Dearborn by engineering its consolidation with neighboring areas, building the Ford Homes district, and running roads and trolley lines to the River Rouge plant. All the while, he promoted suburbs and tried to incentivize and coerce workers into adapting the wholesome “American” lifestyle he associated with them. Ford’s peers followed suit across the United States during the 1920s. With the arrival of the Great Depression, Ford laid off workers and vehemently resisted unionization before finally capitulating to the United Auto Workers in 1941. The UAW sought to preserve and expand Fordism as a way of life, especially after the World War II. Ultimately, the UAW could not adapt to the end of vertical integration. As the Ford Motor Company decentralized, Detroit entered the post-Fordist era. The urban crisis, however, was already in full swing.
Barrow uses familiar themes to explain suburbanization. Detroit expanded outward because of the rise of the automobile. Consumers demanded better living standards as cultural assimilation and rising wages spurred desires of upward mobility. As people moved to the suburbs, the neighborhoods they left behind both declined and became majority-black. Each of these themes rehashes stale arguments that historians have heavily critiqued. In particular, Barrow’s treatment of race and space does not offer anything new, as when she separates housing discrimination into “de facto” segregation borne of “intolerance” and the “de jure” segregation of restrictive covenants (p. 114). Historians such as Matthew Lassiter and Andrew Highsmith have demonstrated that “private” methods of residential segregation often were condoned, if not directly sponsored, by the state. Moreover, the federal government and ostensibly private actors like developers borrowed ideas from each other, mutually replicating and widely reinforcing the logics Barrow simply attributes to “intolerance.”
Despite its analytical shortcomings, the book’s focus on Ford allows it to offer new information on the processes of early twentieth-century suburbanization in Detroit not covered by the most well-known work on the city, Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Brief tantalizing forays into Ford's towns abroad, for example, connect Dearborn to Brazil (pp. 41–44). These rich glimpses could potentially constitute a whole new project that builds on recent literature in transnational urban history.
Nevertheless, the book remains grounded in Dearborn and Detroit, raising the question of to what extent Henry Ford had a plan for “the American” suburb. He possessed ideas for Dearborn and Detroit and, specifically, for Ford company workers. When Ford ran Dearborn from behind the scenes, set the domestic conditions for employees to receive five dollars a day, or laid out residential streets, he envisioned a particular social order for Ford workers that served to maximize profits. He made these decisions, however, in the political economy of Greater Detroit, where most of those workers lived. On the one hand, while providing a close look at Dearborn, the book aims to consider national trends (p. 13). However, despite repeated statements of Ford’s influence, it remains unclear how he illuminated a nationwide picture.
On that other hand, Barrow’s focus on the enigmatic Ford as a suburban developer creates new potential to connect him to realtors and city planners. Dearborn seems at first glance like another paternalistic company town in the early twentieth century, more appropriately placed alongside Pullman, Illinois, than Levittown, New York. However, Ford never held a monopoly on the land like owners of company towns (p. 141). When Barrow recounts the gamut of people, groups, and issues Ford encountered subdividing Dearborn, she could have been describing a day in the life of other prominent housing developers from the 1920s.
What, then, can Ford’s decision making tell readers about the relationship between development, urban policy, and growth in the United States? This is the book’s main unresolved tension: Ford clearly evinces the disproportionate power of certain individuals to guide metropolitan growth in Detroit. He controlled politics, wrangled control over public transportation routes, and tried to shape the daily rhythms of thousands of workers and their families. Yet time and again, Barrow treats common features of growth in twentieth-century America—racial segregation, the rise of so-called inner city slums, and consumer demand for suburban living—as natural forces rather than a product of decisions and structures that eliminated alternatives.
Given this limitation, does the book convincingly relocate the origins of the urban crisis from post-Fordist second half of the twentieth century the Fordist 1920s? Yes, if the crisis can be defined by the moment Henry Ford moved his operations to Dearborn, initiating decentralized residential and industrial patterns that starved Detroit of its tax base. However, identifying the trajectory of “growth” writ-large cannot alone account for Detroit’s fate. It is the very unpacking of those supposedly natural forces that can best explain the conditions American cities and suburbs, past or present.
