Lesson One Sources Document A Photograph from Henry Ford’s assembly line, March 8, 1928. Document B Essay entitled “The First Assembly Line,” by Henry Ford, 1913. A Ford car contains about five thousand parts—that is counting screws, nuts, and all. Some of the parts are
fairly bulky and others are almost the size of watch parts. In our first assembling we simply started to put a
car together at a spot on the floor and workmen brought to it the parts as they were needed in exactly the
same way that one builds a house. When we started to make parts it was natural to create a single
department of the factory to make that part, but usually one workman performed all of the operations
necessary on a small part. The rapid press of production made it necessary to devise plans of production that
would avoid having the workers falling over one another….
The first step forward in assembly came when we began taking the work to the men instead of the men to
the work. We now have two general principles in all operations—that a man shall never have to take more
than one step, if possibly it can be avoided, and that no man need ever stoop over.
…In short, the result is this: by the aid of scientific study one man is now able to do somewhat more than
four did only a comparatively few years ago. That line established the efficiency of the method and we now
use it everywhere. The assembling of the motor, formerly done by one man, is now divided into eighty-four
operations—those men do the work that three times their number formerly did.
Lesson Two Sources Document A My Dear Mr. Ford, Please pardon the means I am taking of asking you for humanity’s sake to investigate and to pardon my seeming rudeness but Mr. Ford I am the wife of one of your final assemblers in your institution and neither one of us want to be agitators [troublemakers] and thus do not want to say anything to make anyone more agitated but you do not know the conditions of your factory are all in or you would not allow it. Are you aware that a man cannot “Buck Nature”? He has to go to the toilet and yet he is not allowed to go at his work. He has to go before he gets there or after work. The chain system you have is a slave driver. My God! Mr. Ford—my husband has come home and thrown himself down and won’t eat his supper—so done out! Can’t this be remedied? Document B Excerpt from an interview with Tom Jelley, who worked at the Ford assembly line in the 1920s. Q: I understand you met Henry Ford.
Jelley: Henry Ford really inspired me. He was a good man.
But the only trouble [with Ford] was the people that he hired to run his business for
him.... Ford made the mistake of hiring a guy by the name of Henry Bennett…
[Bennet] had the whole say of running the plant. And his goons -- and that is what they
were -- they would go into these toilets there, and you were sitting down there, and they
would [tell you to get out] just like that. No dignity at all.
Q: Tell me about the assembly line.
Jelley: They were running, well the length of the building… and carrying parts. Say you were carrying it by hands,
why the conveyors would carry it on the lines, and it was really marvelous the way things moved. Not one brain was
doing that. There was a lot of brains working together. But Ford had such a long vision on it. And they try to hire
people for as cheap as they can too. But Ford did give the first living wage to his employees when he gave $5 and $6 a
day.
Q: Do you remember the $5 day?
Jelley: Yeah. I remember that. They were coming here from all over the world. But I know, from this country, all the
different nationalities that were piling in here for the five and six dollars. And [Ford] was the first one that gave them
that living wage.
Q: Did the men on the line feel the pressure of those outside, waiting for a job?
Jelley: Oh yes. Yes. Sure, they would see it was easier for the company. If you wanted more money, with the people
standing outside, they could let you go and hire somebody else. That's why we really had to have unions then.
Q: Was it easy to get fired?
Jelley: Oh yes, just on the spur of the moment. If you didn't do what they told you to do, you were out of a job.
Q: Could the men on the line keep up?
Jelley: They would speed up the lines, yeah. And you know, we are all different. [Some would] have a lot of trouble
there. Some of them would even pass out, you know, when you start rushing. Yeah.
Q: Were there accidents?
Jelley: Oh yes. There's all kind of safety hazards in a big place like this, with different chemicals and acids and all
that which you are breathing.
Q: What was working on the line like? Was it monotonous?
Jelley: When you are doing the same thing over and over, in your mind you could even fall asleep doing the same
thing over and over all the time.
Q: What could the line workers do to make it less boring?
Jelley: They didn't have a chance to talk to anyone. You [couldn't] sit down and be social and talk to the next person.
No, you didn't have a chance. You were far enough away, and you were just engrossed in your jobs, and you had to do
it. Or you wouldn't do it.
Q: Did they talk or joke?
Jelley: No, no, no. You weren't allowed to talk. You didn't have a chance to talk -- or time. You had a job to do
because if you were just talking around, you wouldn't be doing your job. You wouldn't be concentrating on what you
were doing.
Q: What happened if a man took too long on a break or talked?
Jelley: He was finished. If they had trouble with you... with that, they would fire you. That was it. With the lines
outside, they, the companies had their choice of hiring new people all the time.
Q: Did the men resent their working conditions as degrading?
Jelley: Yeah. Some [did]. There [were] degrading jobs.
Q: Why did they put up with it?
Jelley: When you have to make a living, you have to have the money to live on, so that is why you put up with it
there. And then things got so bad. That is why we got the unions. Solidarity forever, and that is the best thing that ever
happened to us. Well , we weren't the first country to have it, but I think we have had the best unions here.
Document C Scene from the movie “Modern Times,” staring Charlie Chaplin. Premiered in 1936. Lesson Three Sources Document A Newspaper advertisement, 1898 Document B Newspaper advertisement, July 6, 1928