Ford took the Wright Brothers’ workshop from its original location in Ohio and brought it to his village. He took what was left of Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory from New Jersey. He added a 1600s British cottage from the Cotswolds, and Noah Webster’s house from New Haven, Connecticut. He went around to antique stores across the country, amassing endless objects of miscellaneous Americana and arranging them in the village and its accompanying museum. Today, for a pricey entrance fee, one can visit this little slice of the past, where restored Model Ts buzz around and American history is presented as the history of innovations culminating in the wondrous Ford motor car. (Be careful about buying refreshments. A bag of freeze dried Skittles in the gift shop costs $15.)
The village is supposed to be educational, sort of. But it’s more like a tycoon’s giant train set. Ford disdained historians. “History is bunk,” he would often declare. Greenfield Village has been viewed skeptically by historians for its “lack of intellectual coherence.” But that’s the point. The village was not attempting to show history as it actually happened, but to create a kind of vision of a lost paradise, an America that Ford had warm nostalgic feelings for.
It was an America that Ford himself was destroying, and he knew it. His factories were killing the small craftsman, and his cheap, mass-produced cars would produce the nightmare of suburban sprawl (and, ultimately, the catastrophe of climate change). The building of Greenfield Village, Watts says, reflected “an underlying uneasiness with the industrial world that he had created.” The “central designer of the modern American industrial order was in love with the virtues of rural life.” Ford identified with agrarian and small town America. (“I want to see every acre of the earth’s surface covered with little farms, with happy, contented people living on them,” he said.) Greenfield Village was to offer “emotional satisfaction by providing a temporary escape from the intensity of modern life.” But Ford remained a “technofuturist,” publishing a work called Machinery, The New Messiah arguing that technological improvements could solve all of humanity’s problems.
Ford may have known on some level that the system he had created was dehumanizing, and that he had done more than anyone to turn workers into “cogs in a machine.” (His assembly line would soon be famously satirized by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times.) But instead of reorganizing his production process to make it less despotic and hierarchical, instituting real workplace democracy, he built a giant toy village where Americans could go and look, as if into a snow globe, at an idealized tapestry of the country they had lost through the rise of industrial capitalism.
What lessons do we take from the story of Henry Ford? The most obvious should be the dangers of giving a single man a great deal of power and control.