Mass Production

Mass Production. Mass production transformed the way Americans lived and worked at the beginning of the twentieth century. Understandable only as part of the larger socioeconomic system in which it operates, mass production encompasses far more than a set of manufacturing principles and technologies. Thanks to its role in creating mass consumer culture, it constitutes a vital part of contemporary life. It was responsible for the dehumanizing assembly‐line work of the twentieth century as well as the physical comfort enjoyed by most people in industrialized countries. The 1926 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica formally introduced the term in an article titled “Mass production.” Ghost‐written by the Ford Motor Company's publicity secretary, the article appeared over Henry Ford's name. The actual authorship matters little, for Henry Ford is indeed recognized as the man who popularized the term and, more important, made mass production work.

Mass production is characterized by the high‐volume manufacture of standardized goods resulting in lower prices. Dependent on economies of scale and efficiency in production, it relies heavily on a mechanized workplace, the division of labor, and a far larger proportion of machine operators than of skilled workers. It also requires absolute uniformity in production: each piece or component must be made exactly the same each time. This feature of mass production—the manufacture of interchangeable parts—proved so difficult and expensive that it took almost a century to achieve.

The idea that work could be made routine and more productive through mechanization, standardization, and the division of labor long antedated Henry Ford; it can be found in eighteenth‐century England, France, and America. In From the American System to Mass Production (1984), David Hounshell traced the technical development of mass production in the United States, beginning with the arms industry and proceeding through the sewing machine and woodworking industries; agricultural equipment and bicycles; and, finally, the automotive industry. Like that of any invention, mass production's history is one of genius and frustration. With the support of the U.S. government, early nineteenth‐century armories successfully experimented with the mechanized production of guns with interchangeable parts, the essential components of mass production. One after another, American industries mechanized production, but the manufacture of interchangeable parts proved too expensive for many, and without perfect interchangeability, true mass production remains impossible. Lacking this, some manufacturers, such as the Singer Sewing Machine Company, settled for the older system of “fitting” the parts together machine by machine. This resulted not in mass‐produced machines whose parts could be assembled randomly, but in unique machines whose components had to be filed by trained machinists to make the parts fit properly.

The response to mass production is as interesting as the story of its invention. Perfected and most widespread in the United States, mass production and its products have been introduced around the world, rejected nowhere. The inspiration for art, architecture, poetry, and music, it was also criticized as the root cause of the modern ecological crisis and twentieth‐century alienation. Mass production was one of the icons, both beloved and reviled, of the so‐called American century—the twentieth—when the United States became the world's premier military and industrial power.

As the new system of manufacturing developed, workers complained about the growing restrictions in the workplace. Some expressed their discontent by quitting, others by joining unions. No factory had more trouble keeping workers than the Ford Motor Company's Highland Park plant near Detroit, where the assembly line in its fully realized form was introduced in 1914. Workers quit in such large numbers that in 1913 turnover was 380 percent, even before the assembly line became fully operational. Henry Ford addressed the turnover and made himself famous with a single act: to keep his employees on the job in the face of work that many deemed unacceptable, Ford offered them an unheard‐of wage rate of five dollars per day.

The European response to Ford's style of mass production, known as “Fordism,” is surprising compared to the labor response in the United States. During the interwar years, Fordism, along with Frederick W. Taylor's scientific management, was praised, especially in Germany and the Soviet Union, by both conservative engineers and socialist reformers as the way to economic security. Fordism and Taylorism were seen as the keys to the success of modern America and the obvious path for any country seeking modernity.

A widespread and diverse artistic response to mass production can be found in film, painting, photography, literature, and music. The central inspiration for this response, sometimes called “machine‐age modernism,” was the mass‐production factory. Film provides the clearest and most unambiguous initial reaction to mass production. Movies like Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), which used Ford's factory as a model; René Clair's A nous la liberté (1931); and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926) unabashedly criticized mass production and the socioeconomic system that supported it. Other artists, however, found the modern factory a positive inspiration. The painters Charles Sheeler and Diego Rivera both portrayed Ford's Detroit factories and praised them (in very different ways) in their art. Modern architecture, beginning with the Bauhaus designs of Walter Gropius, derived much of its inspiration from American factories. As practitioners of a wide range of art forms embraced the symbols of mass production and the machine age in general, these technological developments became increasingly accepted as part of modernist culture, no longer questioned but taken for granted as integral components of the social and economic landscape.
See also Advertising; “American System” of Manufactures; Bicycles and Bicycling; Business; Business Cycle; Capitalism; Factory System; Industrialization; Labor Markets; Labor Movements; Mass Marketing; Strikes and Industrial Conflict; Technology; Whitney, Eli.

Bibliography

Alfred D. Chandler , The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revelation in American Business, 1977.
Stephen Meyer , The Five Dollar Day, 1981.
Cecilia Tichi , Shifting Gears, 1987.
Thomas P. Hughes , American Genesis, 1989.
Lindy Biggs , The Rational Factory, 1996.
Robert Kanigel , The One Best Way, 1997.

Lindy Biggs