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Other Voices from the Depression

I used to talk with Giaccomo Fiori about Viterbo, his native town. Directly after lunchtime on the second shift Giaccomo would come rolling round to the rear door of the cagework separating Tool Stock from the other departments in the B Building at Highland Park. He operated one of those battery-driven shop trucks on which the pilot stands on wide pedals at the nose of the vehicle. Leaning rotundly forward, the tiller against his hip, Giaccomo resembled the figurehead of some odd landcraft, carved in the likeness of a rustic deity from a region of olives and wine.

Even the balefully blue glare of the mercury tube lights which tend to accentuate each trace of haggardness, illness, or care in a man's features, setting it forth starkly bathed or hollowly recessed in a jaundiced green, failed to disturb this illusion.

I had been reading the Human Tragedy of Anatole France, and it occurred to me that the hero of the book had also begun his career in Viterbo. Giaccomo was pleased with the version I was able to give him of the story, and told me things he remembered of the town, and also of Florence, of which he had some knowledge from the proletarian side. When, lifting boxes of tools and equipment from truck to floor, he spoke of other things, it was of the wine he was making or of babies he had completed at home. The truck unloaded, I would give him a receipt for the material he had brought, and he would back out and wheel away, with a touch of his cap and a word of amiable farewell.

Day after day, trip by trip, Giaccomo piloted his truck amid a continuously shifting cacophony of sights, sounds, smells, and movements— a packed and varied clangor that seemed close to pandemonium. From the ringing rasp of grinding wheels and their showering sparks he wheeled past ranks of testing blocks, mounted with varicolored lights, in an atmosphere dense with fumes and the roar of motors. Here magneto parts were being normalized in bluely blowing furnaces and plunged in baths of smoking oil; there a crane hooker shrilled his warning whistle and a pile of sheet steel stock swung down, paused, and was lowered with a wham to the floor. Here piston rings were jangling in showers down the rods on which they were bolted for dispatch to the motor assembly line; there pistons were being machined under flows of sterilized sodawater and hung on hooks depending from a monorail chain conveyor traveling toward production or rather toward final fabrication, in dips and curves among machines and men. The sustained rattling smash of tumbling barrels emptying their content down metal flumes; the pouncing, grating slam of batteries of punchpresses; the shriek of gang drills; the violent chatter and sudden churning bang of automatic screw machines.... Through these and a score of other assaults on the senses Giaccomo Fioro rode, piloting, for eight hours each day or night. And on his way he whistled. And when he paused, in proper company, he smiled, and spoke of wine, of babies, and of Viterbo. He was social, civilized, a man alive.

When I went to work at the Highland Park plant I was assigned to a large, complex tool crib supplying the motor assembly line. Here I learned the run of tool crib work. After a few weeks a dour foreman of English birth escorted me to the tool crib of the roller bearing department and turned me loose for duty.

The first thing I noted about the crib was that there were duckboards along the stock counters—laid wherever one had to walk. I had last seen them at Brest, where the insignia of the troops attached, in fact, had been a white duckboard on a red ground. But at Camp Pontanezen they were used to supply a firm footing in the mud for which the place was dubiously famed, while in the roller bearing department at Highland Park they were laid to shield one's feet against the excessive heat. Directly beneath, on the ground floor, a semi -circular battery of furnaces heated steel billets for forging into heavy structural or mechanical parts in a close-by hydraulic press. The furnaces kept the crib comfortable in winter; in the summer the temperature was not as a rule unpleasant, with the duckboards in place.

When I got a chance, later on, I walked out on the balcony and took a look at the forging job below. The balcony was a railed extension of the crib-level floor, and from its far end, behind the crib, one got a clear safe view. The billets were handled throughout the process by an electrically powered manipulator: a carriage rested on flanged wheels on rails extending from the semicircle of furnaces to a point before the press; mounted on it was a pivoted structure mounted in turn with a ponderous arm outthrust perhaps a dozen feet, terminating in a pair of massive jaws; a shield protected a goggled operator, posted on the carriage, from the heat. He stood amid a system of controls. It reminded one of a great steel beetle.

But the beetle of steel was more flexible than its natural prototype. Under the operator's touch it swung laterally, thrust its jaws into a furnace, withdrew a billet at white heat, reswung, and headed for the press, gripping the incandescent brand. Deftly, with care it rested the billet on the lower die, waited until the tipper die drove down upon it and withdrew, and then turned it over, or shifted it forward, or both. Then there would be another squeeze, with perhaps a special tool inserted between die and billet to gain the form desired. And so on, until the form had been completed, or until the hue of the billet reached a point showing that it had to be heated again before the job could be continued.

I had never seen a machine so complex, powerful, and resourceful as the manipulator. Yet its controls were concentrated under the hands and at the elbows of its single operator, and it handled the blinding billets as though its moves were an extension in reflex of those of the man behind the shield.

Except for offices and specialized structures, Ford plant architecture today runs to one-story buildings. But at Highland Park there was a whole block of buildings, designated by letters ranging up to six stories in height. They formed a continuous structure, each unit of which was traversed by a central craneway flanked by production and shipping floors. At one end they opened to admit railway spurs for shipping and receiving. At the other they were bounded by a battery of elevators and continuous levels of flooring for communication and distribution. Traveling about the plant in the line of duty I used to halt to look down one of the craneways from one of the upper floors, which at the communication end of the structures ended, as one says, at the crane-ways' brink.

White-edged and railed tiers of flooring stretched into the distance on either side, seemingly crammed with men and machines. Staggered landings jutted at intervals from the several upper levels, and upon these the crane, rumbling along under the glass-checkered roof, delivered material unloaded from railway cars along its line of travel. From upper floors conveyors carried automotive parts obliquely downward to the loading docks, for shipment to the assembly branches. In the distance the craneway was crossed by covered bridges and finally was lost in a haze of vaporous blue thrown off by the heat process jobs along the tiered line. Behind me a rank of elevators opened corrugated doors to empty men pushing hand trucks and piloting power trucks, and to admit others of the same. Time clocks extended unobtrusively along the head-end rails. Transverse floors and aisles swam with machines and men.

These buildings are put to other use now. They were a sight while they lasted.

Now and again a crib foreman asked me to help or relieve a worker at some other crib, and by this process I learned something about the various workings of the plant.

The worst department to work in was probably that where radiators were made. Goggled men stood in ranks behind individual gas furnaces and soldered tubes for eight hours at a stretch. The fumes from the acid stung the nose; the air was dense with gas; the acid itself forced the workers to wear neck-high rubber aprons, elbow-length rubber gauntlets, and rubber boots extending in a direct slant from shin to toe, so that in contour the wearer's feet resembled those of Percherons. To handle the acid-splotched equipment one had to put on rubber one's self, except for the boots.

While still working at the roller bearing crib I was assigned to write a description for the official company publication of the art-leather manufacturing process developed at Highland Park. Like the plate glass process it was continuous. From large mixing tanks with horizontal agitators, black-pigmented explosive—a liquid with a guncotton base— was pumped aloft into troughs that distributed it evenly over cotton fabric flowing endlessly beneath. Rollers kept the fabric straight, rollers with automatic tension equipment kept it properly taut, rollers evened the depth of deposit, as the strip in process flowed, motor-drawn, under the troughs and through the drying ovens, acquiring successive glossy coats. Undulating from floor to roof, the flow of fabric was protected by pyramidal galvanized housings against the outer dust. A static spark within merely exploded the imprisoned fumes through paper-faced doors. All lights for the outer room were mounted within reflectors against the exterior of the window panes, to eliminate the chance of ignition from a defective circuit. Fumes in this larger space escaped readily through ventilators, and motors were tightly housed. The blankly black coated cotton went from the drying ovens to await, in ranks of rolls, impression by high-pressure dies, some of which reproduced faithfully a true leather grain.

Not long afterward I was transferred to the center of the tool supply system, mainly to engage in filling orders for the many tool cribs of Highland Park plant.

My job was simple. Given a quota of orders to fill, I segregated crib boxes and requisitioned books in pairs, placed them in turn on a knee-high "buggy"—a box body on casters—and shoved off on a tour of collection down aisles flanked high with tiers of compartmented shelves. Almost all items were designated by letter and number, so there was seldom anything except rudimentary thought required. Now and then one had to take care of an emergency call at the supply window or explore the grinding wheel stock division a rod or two away. That was about all.

Oddly enough, on this job segregated by cagework from belts and whirling wheels, I had a mishap that came within an inch of being serious. An 18-inch file slid from a shelf above my head, as I felt for stock, and punched a hole in my face near my left eye. Outside of this I received my share of minor cuts from oily, sharp, and oddly shaped machine tools. I always took the result to the first-aid station nearest the department. I had seen what a neglected sliver or scratch could do, regardless of one's brawn or health. I felt rich in neither.

After two years in the shop at Highland Park I was transferred to take the place of a man on sick leave from the official company publication. I was sifted out, escorted to the nearest service station ("service" by this time perhaps needs no explanation, in the Ford sense: service men are company police), told to quit at 8 p.m. and to report at 8 a.m. at Dearborn.

From then on my education became broader and more intensive. It became my function to visit various plants and departments, make notes on the details of processes and developments, and throw the results into narrative form for publication.

Three years on this job gave me something of a journalistic understanding of the Ford industries, as of 1925-28. One cannot say whether much of this understanding might not be irrelevant now.

In the late fall of my first year of writing I toured the Upper Michigan Peninsula, making notes on Ford operations there, from the woodworking, wood chemistry, and hydropower plants at Iron Mountain to the sawmills and logging camps near Lake Superior. At the Ford iron mine in Michigamme, in between, I was impressed by the casual acceptance of familiar danger that comes to mining men. The novice venturing underground is apt to observe that the timbers of transverse passages, a few hundred feet down, are slowly splintering under the weight of rock and earth above. Further, at the end of a drift, a new salient where the latest blast has been fired, he notes that no timbers can be placed until the debris from the shot has been cleared by men working at the new face under a vault of the bare slate itself. Slatefalls are an ever-present possibility, and clearing a drift with a scoop dancing back and forth on a cable driven by a compressed-air motor is a ticklish job. But the men reared to mining at Michigamme got their thrills from hunting—the deer season was on at the time of my call—and took the job as a matter of course.

Not long after I got back to the Detroit area I learned a man had been brained by a slatefall while clearing a drift at the Michigamme mine. And not so long after that a stagnant lake, over the Wisconsin line, found an aperture underneath it, where a strain, not definitely mensurable, had been before, and let itself into an iron mine below. No dead were washed up, naturally, under the conditions, and none was recovered until the water was pumped away. And the pumping proved profitless, because no one will work there anyway, now; everyone claims the man on the siren, who tied himself to the lever against the rush of water, so his dead weight would keep it sounding, is still on the job. Because everyone hears him.

My favorite men in the Ford organization were engineers and departmental bosses. They had no theories about the social benefits of mass production or conveyor assembly; they were too busy, at close range, on the job.

One was a rigger I met at Iron Mountain. He was long-geared, keen, blond, with steel in the glint of his eyes amid the spring of his lean body that his southern mildness of tongue and carelessness of movement did not conceal. He was enthused, when I met him first over the job of installing a turbogenerator set in the steam powerhouse—he had come up from Detroit to put it across. Some tons of cast housings, turbine, rotor, and stator had to be skidded through a gouged-out window opening eight or ten feet above grade. Before taking off for farther north I requested a photograph in process of the job. The task was completed without injury to structure, machine, or limb.

In the winter of 1925-26 I met the rigger at the Rouge. He wore a fuzzy gray mackinaw that gave his long legs free movement as he strode and straddled over the first of the 199 ships towed in, by way of the St. Lawrence and the Lakes, for scrapping to the Rouge slip. This vessel was the guinea pig of the lot. Apparently no tried method existed for scrapping a steel ship at a profit. Ford men would have to devise means of doing the job efficiently before the rest began to arrive, or else the company would have to take an indefinitely large loss. A shipbuilding concern near Philadelphia was operating on another of the fleet, perhaps to supply a norm for the timecost of the unit job.

The problem for Ford was to scrap and tear down the fleet it had bought, utilizing the scrap and whatever units and parts it could salvage, so efficiently that the result would show a balance on the black side of the company ledger, or at least not a balance on the red side.

An experimental disc shear, suspended from the boom of an ore unloader, was slitting vertically the hull of ship number 1; but halts were many: whenever the cutting edges struck a cross reinforcement the motor squealed and the power had to be shut off. The job looked hopeless—what with the heavy keel and super-structural metal to be cut loose. But the rigger went over the job, time and again, eager as a hound.... It took more than 100 days to tear down the first ship, but before the summer was out an assembly line had been organized in reverse, and ships were being cut to waterline at the rate of two or three a week.

Another Ford man I liked was the working chief of the welding development division. In dress, look, and speech he might have been an average blacksmith. He had been a strawboss on the battery job, or something such, and had been reassigned without warning.

He didn't know, as welding experts did, what couldn't be done in the way of sewing steel together with electric sparks. He had to start out to learn what could. At the time there were perhaps 400 weldings involved in the fabrication of a Ford car.

As job after job succumbed to his desperate attack, part after part, assembly after assembly, was made obsolete, was replaced: to be brief, cast iron and rivets or bolts were replaced by forged or pressed steel parts, fabricated, unified, more strongly than as if they were one in the first place, with electrical heat and mechanical pressure, in special machines. The new units were lighter, stronger, more durable, less costly.

Along in 1926 some important new parts were being put to test in company cars. The handiest test car was the interplant mail car, which toured the Detroit Ford area perhaps four times a daylight day on a rigid time schedule. I used to ride it because it was often the most efficient means of reaching a job I was assigned to describe. One of the new parts—unit-parts—being tried out on the mail car was the gas tank later incorporated in the Model A. It had been lifted apparently from the Citroen, of which a specimen was parked on the ground floor of the Dearborn laboratory. But the fabrication was different, one knows. Two intricately mated shells had to be fitted together and stitched seamlessly together along a flange; it had to be a weld, not an arc weld; it had to be a continuous weld, no possibility of leaks; the only way to weld it on a quantity-production scale was between rollers.

The shells were of zinc-coated metal, and the theory was that metal thus treated couldn't be welded without burning. Theory also said that welding current couldn't be applied through rollers when a seamless weld had to be made, because there were bound to be rises and falls in volume and consequent leaks along the flange where contact was made. But the simian soul who had been put on the welding job at Ford's was too dense too stubborn, to realize the truth of the theory. lie tried one thing after another, and finally stabilized the current flow by filling his contact chambers with quicksilver. I inspected one of the tanks he made after it had been dropped from an airplane, amid afterward emptied and blown up with air under pressure until it doubled over like a sofa pillow. It didn't leak.

Before I left the job the welding boss had in operation an automatic welding machine for the differential housing. The operator inserted the U-shaped incomplete circle of steel in a fixture, along with the steel cylinder which was the sleeve for the driving pinion, shut a door, and turned on the juice. At intervals he had to press buttons to govern the process in progress, but the dumb bunnie who contrived the machine had devised a revolving guard that prevented one pressing any but the right one at the right instant; as long as the operator was able to move he couldn't go wrong.

The new model had a couple of thousand welds in its system, most of them a matter of heat and pressure. No welding machine company could supply the machines to make them until drawings could be supplied from the experimental machine devised by the welding development division. When the decision to get the new model into production came, in 1927, and it was decided, on the spot, that everything involved should have been done yesterday, there was considerable hell to pay.

Once I wrote up the drop-forging lob, shouting questions against the slam of 90-odd steam hammers. I explored the lead reclamation department on a hot July day: old batteries bought by Ford dealers were melted down there by the ton, and the metal from them was tested, rectified, and poured into pigs. Another time I had to try to find out, for publication, what had become of the equipment salvaged whole from the 199 ships already mentioned. Deck houses were serving as tool shanties for railroad section gangs, keel sections were supporting balconies in the rolling mill, and gratings had become the second floor of Tool Stock, my old department, now transferred to the Rouge. A marine engine was running a motor-generator set for the coke ovens at the Rouge; marine boilers had been installed at the Lincoln plant; asbestos lagging had been assigned to kiln maintenance at Iron Mountain.... The spread, in short, was considerable.

I spent two trying times with Ford. Once, in 1924, we tooled up for 12,000 cars a day until drills and reamers were piled to the ceiling; and then, in instant response to a drop in orders, shipments were cut off, single men went on short time, and married men were lucky to get in four days a week. In 1927, between Model T and Model A, whole departments disappeared overnight, service men and grim executives paced the plants trying to figure whom to eliminate next, and I was told to keep my head down, by wellwishers, for fear I might be among the proscribed. Not being able to fatten on a diet of work and fear I went to headquarters for a decision, and from then on all I had to do was work.

I quit the company, for more money, with a passably good record, in the spring of 1928.

MURRAY GODWIN