A wide scholarship exists on Henry Ford and the business giant he launched. Brian McMahon's The Ford Century in Minnesota contributes to this scholarship with an evocative picture of what Ford business strategies meant to people who shaped the company's endeavors to the contours of Minnesota lives. This beautiful book testifies in accessible prose and stunning images to the ways that those involved in designing, planning, running, and working in Ford's branch enterprises became key agents in shaping the company's distinctive significance in a particular region of its U.S. operations.
To capture the particular shape of Ford's impact in Minnesota, McMahon both draws on a wide scholarly literature and uses a variety of primary sources culled from local historical archives and newspapers, as well as company and union newsletters, regional advertising, and extensive interviews with people who labored in all phases of Ford's operations in the state. Together these sources amply demonstrate the ways Minnesota Ford dealers, workers, and managers contributed to the company's national and global impact. In applying his sources to the purpose of showcasing “the remarkable stories and contributions of Ford's supporting cast in Minnesota,” McMahon highlights three facets of Ford's operations that are especially visible from the state: the culture of inventive tinkering that characterized the broad roots of U.S. car culture; the significance of Ford's facilities in shaping Minnesota's built environment and the civic conflicts attending its development; and the significance to workers of the organization and agency unleashed through their communities of labor and struggle on the line (p. viii).
McMahon's account starts with Stephen Tenvoorde, a St. Cloud blacksmith and bicycle shop owner, marveling at an early automobile that drove into the small town in 1900. Becoming one of Ford's earliest dealers, Tenvoorde dramatizes the important role vernacular mechanical talents like his played in the Ford story. Prior to the continuous assembly lines that made the Model T and later Ford products broadly accessible, McMahon shows, small-town dealers often received partially assembled cars along with more easily shipped stacked parts that they added. In the process, they became part of a contentious rural culture of automotive adventure, mechanical acumen, and entrepreneurial inventiveness upon which Ford also drew and which he transformed. (McMahon here reinforces Christopher Wells's account in Car Country: An Environmental History [2012] of how cyclists—whom McMahon finds sparring with local farmers—promoted road improvements that made cars more saleable). Tenvoorde's assembly efforts eventually gave way to Ford's establishment of regional subplants, such as the company's Minneapolis plant, built in the 1910s, though Minnesota's dealers went on to weather a welter of Ford's shifting distribution policies associated with his idiosyncratic approaches to model changes.
Minneapolis’ branch plant was quickly superseded by the Twin Cities Assembly Plant on the St. Paul side of the Mississippi, which could accommodate a continuous assembly line. The plans, politics, and construction for both plants provide several revealing dramas of design, urban planning, and engineering deftly handled by dint of McMahon's own expertise at the intersection of architecture, urban history, and industry. While Ford's own early twentieth-century enthusiasms like industrial decentralization, the rationalization of transportation, and the balancing of industry with nature drew him to the river, rivalries between Minneapolis and St. Paul over hydroelectric rights to a dam originally erected by the Army Corps of Engineers formed the energy and production opportunities he found there. McMahon illuminates how this battle engaged both high-minded advocacy concerning relative benefits of municipal versus private ownership of utilities as well as clandestine negotiations between civic and industrial leaders (the latter, in changing economic environments, characterizing both the inauguration and termination of Ford's Twin City operations). McMahon's research into engineering, architecture, and city planning at the site also demonstrates how the assembly plant molded the environment in which it was situated through industrial architect Albert Kahn's stately design as well as accommodations for parkland, recreation, and a nearby residential subdivision that Ford negotiated with civic and real estate interests. Here, some additional attention to the patterns of residence that employees developed would have added texture to the significance of this built environment.
The most compelling stories in McMahon's account concern the daily experiences of, as well as epic organizational efforts undertaken by, the people employed at Ford's Minnesota operations. Minnesota managers and industrial engineers who put in long hours implementing often-mercurial demands coming from company headquarters have their due. But, in the second half of the book, McMahon focuses particularly closely on what workers experienced on the line and in contentious relations between unionized labor and management as well as within UAW Local 879, which represented the plant. Recollections of the rigors of hot and rapid work and the improvements realized through changing management styles demonstrate how Ford policies looked from the Minnesota factory floor. The workers’ own impact is revealed through tales of their strategies for addressing the surveillance by time-study men and the injustices they identified with globalized production. Their voices provide an alternate perspective on the famously belated Ford turn to quality control through testimonies to workers’ concerns about product quality that fell on the deaf ears of a management seemingly interested only in cost cutting. As McMahon shows, in the context of growing uncertainty about the future of U.S. auto manufacturing, workers had to maintain their ideals against multiple challenges, as when Local 879's Unity Caucus defied company and union leaders by resisting new collaborative management practices that seemed to weaken union foundations of collective bargaining and worker advocacy. Rather than relinquish this legacy, McMahon shows, Twin City Ford workers stretched the lines of solidarity across national borders to include Ford workers in Mexico, whose union rights were in even greater jeopardy.
In 2011, Ford shut down the Twin City Assembly Plant assembly line for good, dismantled the factory, and relocated production of the Ford Ranger that had been its final project outside the borders of Minnesota and the United States. McMahon's book eloquently attests to the significance across the Ford Century and beyond of those who made Ford cars, and of Ford's significance, in Minnesota.
