An automobile assembly line looks fairly simple—at least conceptually. Parts come to the line and are added to a growing vehicle as it moves along the line, until the finished automobile arrives at the end of the line and exits as a finished product. A closer examination, however, reveals that the line is only a piece of a more complex system of production. When we recognize that the parts themselves are assembled—on a different production line, in a different part of the same factory or in a different factory—we realize that the assembly line is merely the final line in a complex system of lines: A production line. Parts. Workers. Energy. Skill and know-how. Furthermore, the line is itself the result of a production process that is a part of a larger, ever more complex, system—not just a system of production, but a far more complex social system. As a simpler example, consider the assembly line that was adopted in the manufacture of household labor-saving equipment. These assembly lines dramatically reduced the labor time necessary to complete household production. As a result, women, being freed from much of the time needed for housework, began moving in much greater numbers into the paid labor force. This changed the whole social culture of households, leading to a tremendous amount of social change.
This is the process that David E, Nye, a professor of American studies at the University of Southern Denmark, reveals to us in America’s Assembly Line. This is an interesting book on the evolutionary process from which Henry Ford’s first real production line emerged. The mechanized assembly line that Ford Motor Company put into operation in 1913 resulted from a process that no one really foresaw during its creation between 1908 and 1913.
Nye follows this process from its beginning stages as the prerequisites for a moving assembly line themselves evolved, through the assembly line’s invention, celebration, export, and critique, and to the challenges the globalization of the automobile industry created for American automobile companies. In fact, these are basically the chapters of this excellent story. Of specific importance in this story is, of course, the impact of the Depression, along with World War II and the Cold War that followed. Nye devotes an excellent chapter specifically to the significant impacts these two historical periods had on the continued evolution of the assembly line and the responses of the American automobile companies to the unique challenges they presented. The process of change from the Depression’s industrial idleness to the assembly line’s emergence as the production technique that converted American industry into the “arsenal of democracy,” ultimately smothering the Axis powers in huge quantities of planes, ships, tanks, and the other industrial weapons of war, is particularly enlightening.
Nye tells the story not just from the perspective of the engineer or even the automobile industry executives and workers, but integrates throughout the book the work of intellectuals and the cultural artists of film, music, and fiction who commented throughout the period on the social impacts of the evolving assembly line. He discusses how and why the assembly line emerged at the specific place (Detroit), in the specific industry (automobile assembly), and at the specific historical time (1908–1913). This story not unlike the more familiar one of the emergence of the personal computing industry from a garage in Southern California and the resulting great reduction in the costs of processing information. Nye explains the factors that led to Ford Motor Company putting together the preexisting pieces to produce a production process that so greatly reduced the costs of automobile production to allow the transportation revolution of the early twentieth century. As he explains, it is the cultural context of the United States that made it the most fertile ground for the first blossoming of an assembly line that would revolutionize industry in the following decades.
It was not just technological change that created the dramatic reductions in cost that allowed for the mass consumption of automobiles necessary for a transportation revolution and all that such a revolution entails within a society. It is the development of a whole new system, and Nye illustrates the importance of changes in administration as well as production. Managerial techniques must keep up. New methods of accounting, inventory control, and labor–management relations, along with wage and benefit structures, are also essential.
The book emphasizes the importance of the $5 per day salary instituted by Ford in terms of creating the mass market demand necessary to support mass production technologies. This is the foundation on which much of the cultural aspects of the book rely. Interestingly, this idea leads to a discussion of the housing industry and whether mass production techniques could make housing affordable for the masses as well. Although spending some time discussing the stop-and-go nature of the efforts to use assembly line techniques in the housing industry, I was left wondering why this has never become the industry norm. Perhaps Nye can take this up in his next volume.
The one part of the book where I wanted more, or perhaps more balance, is the two chapters in which Nye discusses the challenge to the American automobile industry presented by, and its responses to, the “Japanese model” and the more recent globalization of the world economy. The Japanese model discussed in the book is as much a model of labor–management relations as it is a production model. Nye seems to place the blame for the failure of American auto firms almost exclusively on management. Although much of the harm to American firms and workers is rightfully due to managerial mistakes, Nye seems to lose track of the systematic nature of the production system when discussing the events of the past two or three decades in the auto industry.
What is lacking in this final part of the book is a good analysis of the modern social system as it exists in the United States and its impact on the ability of American firms to respond effectively to the challenges of the Japanese model and the globalization of the automobile industry. Auto production takes place in a social system that includes not only firms and unions, but also government policies and social ideas and perceptions. Union work rules and the antagonistic nature of labor relations in the United States during this period, along with all kinds of government regulations and rules concerning safety, pensions, health care, and benefits, have played a major role in how American firms have managed their businesses and responded to the challenges of globalization. The complex system of the global automobile industry and the specific culture of labor–management relations and the American perspective of the role of government deserve more attention in the analysis of what happened in the assembly lines that are the American automobile industry over the past two or three decades.
America’s Assembly Line is, overall, an important and very interesting addition to our understanding of the evolution of industrial production. The systemic nature of the analysis is impressive and makes for an enjoyable read for historians, social scientists of all types, and anyone interested in the social processes that produce the world in which we live and work.
