Capitalism and Dehumanization Theme Analysis

They were poor, but far from hopeless; not only had they the certainty of a blessed state in the hereafter, but the children were all going to school, and the family shared the faith of all American families, that the young ones would rise in the world. America was the land of opportunity, and wonderful things were happening every day. The poorest boy had the right to become president; and beside this grand prize were innumerable smaller ones, senators, governors, judges, and all the kings, lords, and lesser nobility of industry. Life in this land was a sort of perpetual lottery; every mother who bore a child, even in a dingy slum, was putting her hand into a grab-bag, and might draw out a dazzling jewel.

And while Abner and Milly were thus fulfilling their dream, Mr. Ford was occupied with his; to bring it about that when the little Shutts grew up—and likewise the little Smiths and Schultzes and Slupskys and Steins—they should find millions of little horseless carriages available at second-hand prices, to convey them to any place on the land-surface of the globe except a few mountain-tops.

In the year after the panic he produced 6,181 cars, a little over three per worker; but within three years he was managing to get thirty-five thousand cars out of six thousand workers.

Of course nobody ever showed these figures to Abner Shutt, and they wouldn’t have meant much to him anyhow. In that period, while learning to make twice as many cars for his employer, Abner was getting a fifteen percent increase in wages, and was considering himself one of the luckiest workers in America. And maybe he was, at that. There were breadlines in Detroit for two winters, reminding him of those dreadful years of his boyhood which had weakened him in body, mind, and soul.

Some persons would not have cared for this life, but Abner didn’t know any such persons, and had no contact with their ideas. He did not think of the Ford plant as an immense and glorified sweatshop; he thought of it as a place of both duty and opportunity, where he did what he was told and got his living in return. […] If you had asked him to tell you his ultimate dream of happiness on this earth, he would have answered that it was to have money enough to buy one of those cars—a bruised and battered one, any one so long as it would run, so that he could ride to work under shelter when it was raining, and on Sundays could pack Milly and the kids into it, and take them into the country, where his oldest brother worked for a farmer, and they could buy vegetables at half the price charged at the corner grocery.

Never had there been such a device for speeding up labor. You simply moved a switch, and a thousand men jumped more quickly. It was an invisible tax, like the tariff, which the consumer pays without being aware of it. The worker cannot hold a stopwatch, and count the number of cars which come to him in an hour. Even if he learns about it from the man who sets the speed of the belt—again it is like the tariff in that he can do nothing about it. If he is a weakling, there are a dozen strong men waiting outside to take his place. Shut your mouth and do what you’re told!

It passed Abner’s comprehension how any man or woman could fail to be grateful for such divine compassion on the part of Mr. Ford. But human nature is notoriously perverse, and many of the men grumbled bitterly against having their private lives investigated, and they changed the name of the new department from “Social” to “Snooping.” Instead of complying loyally with the terms of the agreement, they set to work to circumvent it by diabolical schemes. […] Some of these tricks were caught up with, and the tricksters were fired, and there was not a little spying and tale-bearing and suspicion.

He loathed war as a stupid, irrational, and altogether hideous thing. He began to give less and less of his time to planning new forges and presses, and more and more to writing, or at any rate having written, statements, interviews, and articles denouncing the war and demanding its end. To other business men, who believed in making all the money you could, and in whatever way you could, this propaganda seemed most unpatriotic; the more so as many of them were actively working to get America into the conflict, and multiply their for- tunes overnight.

Dean Marquis had been a wise counsellor during the five years he was in Henry’s employ. But now in several cases he saw injustice done, and tried to intervene, and discovered that Henry was pretending not to know anything about actions which had been taken upon his express orders; he promised to investigate, but did nothing; and so, reluctantly, Dean Marquis realized that the period of idealism was past, and that there was no longer any place for a Christian gentleman in the Ford business machine.

He showed how Jews, controlling stage and screen, were depraving American morals; they were doing this, not because it paid, but as a deliberate plot to break down American civilization. Drunkenness was spreading, and it was not because the Jews were making money out of liquor, but because they wanted America drunk. Jews controlled the clothing trade, and so American girls were wearing short skirts. Jews controlled music, and so the American people listened to jazz and danced themselves crazy.

The Ford empire was not a metaphor but a fact, not a sneer but a sociological analysis. Henry was more than any feudal lord had been, because he had not merely the power of the purse, but those of the press and the radio; he could make himself omnipresent to his vassals, he was master not merely of their bread and butter but of their thoughts and ideals.

Such things do not seem much to outsiders, but they are what break the spirit of poor people who have always earned what they spent and kept themselves “respectable.” Abner had come now to the point where he had to forget that his second son was a bootlegger and a gangster, and let Milly take gratefully whatever money Hank brought.

With every month of the depression these things had got worse and worse. The twenty-five thousand workers were driven until they went out “punch-drunk.” Sometimes one went out on a stretcher, because men so driven couldn’t handle machinery without accidents. On no subject had Henry written more eloquently than on the importance of safety; but again and again his “safety department” was overruled by his speed-up department, and there was a saying in the plant that it took one life a day. They had their own hospital, and there was no way to get any figures.

He had once been simple and democratic; but his billion dollars now decreed that he should live like an Oriental despot, shut off by himself, surrounded by watchmen and guards. He who had liked to chat with his men and show them the work now would not dare to walk past his own assembly line without the protection of secret service men. He who had been so talkative had now grown morose and moody. His only associates were “yes-men,” those who agreed with everything he said. He met few strangers, because everybody was trying to get some of his money, and he was sick of being asked. His secretaries helped to keep him alone, because he had made a fool of himself so many times, they could never be sure what he would say next.

So there was Henry Ford’s answer to Abner Shutt and the rest of his unemployed workers. Or rather, it was the answer of the billion dollars which had taken charge of Henry’s life. A score or two of men lay in hospitals with bullet-wounds, also with handcuffs on their wrists and chains fastening them to their beds; but not a single policeman or “service man” had a bullet-wound.

The Ford Model A had gone back to the old days when you could have only one color. It might be called Arabian sand, or Dawn grey, or Niagara blue, or Gun Metal blue—but it would always be Fresh Human Blood.

I am greatness, I am power, I am pride, pomp, and dominion, said the fortune of Henry Ford; I am a dynasty, surviving into the distant future, making history which will not be “bunk,” carrying the name of Ford and the glory of Ford to billions of unborn people. But there are evil men, devils in human form loose in the world, who plot to take that glory from me; who desire that the world shall talk, not about Henry and Edsel, and Henry II, and Benson, and Josephine Clay, and William Ford, now fully grown and ready for their share of glory, but about persons with names such as Trotsky and Zinoviev and Bela Kun and Radek and Liebknecht and Luxemburg and Jaurès and Blum.

Tom Shutt couldn’t see any member of his audience, but he could hear them, and they were not slow in letting him know what they thought about his arguments. Were they getting a living wage out of the motor industry? Were they able to buy the products of the factories and the farms? They made plain that they were not; and Tom told them that their troubles could be summed up in one simple statement: that under the New Deal profits had increased fifty percent while wages had increased only ten percent. So the very factor which had caused the depression was working faster than ever, leading them straight to another smashup, unless they could find a way to increase wages at the expense of profits.

The gangsters were making a professional job of it. They had Tom on his side and were kicking him in the small of his back to loosen his kidneys.

“Chassez out,” called the prompter; the old-timers always pronounced it “Shashay.” And then, “Form lines.” The dancers moved with perfect grace, knowing every move.

The chief executioner was now kicking his victim in the groin, so that he would not be of much use to his wife for a while.

“Six hands around the ladies,” called the prompter. Such charming smiles from elderly ladies, playing at coquetry, renewing their youth.

“You should let yourself be happier, dear,” the wife was saying. “You have done a great deal of good in the world.”

“Have I?” said the Flivver King. “Sometimes I wonder, can anybody do any good. If anybody knows where this world is heading, he knows a lot more than me.”