Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)


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United Auto Writers: Poetry from the United Auto Worker, 1937-1939 / John Marsh

 

Abstract: During the 1930s, and as part of the effort to organize the new unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations or to revitalize the old unions of the American Federation of Labor, hundreds of workers and labor organizers would write and publish poems in their union newspapers. In this essay, I focus on the poetry of a single union, the United Auto Workers, from its origins in the Flint-sit down strike of 1936-1937 to the campaign to organize Ford workers in the years that followed. During that period, the United Auto Worker published around 110 poems and these poems, I argue, offer a window into the living and working conditions of autoworkers during the latter half of the Depression decade. Specifically, these poems articulate the protest autoworkers made against the assembly line, automaker's "fascistic" anti-union practices, and a burgeoning capitalist economy and culture that invited workers to think of themselves as consumers rather than workers. More generally, I argue that these poems detail how solidarity among workers emerged - that is, in response to the actions of employers, the state, and popular culture - and the role that poetry played in its formation. Moreover, and taken as a whole, these poems suggest the wealth of recovery and rediscovery projects that remain for scholars of the left, especially when we look beyond the conventional sites of publication and beyond the conventional expectations of who constitutes an author.

 

<1> During the afternoon shift of December 30, 1936, workers at the Fisher No. 1 General Motors factory in Flint, Michigan learned that foremen had ordered the plant's dies to be loaded onto waiting trains. [1] The enormous dies at Flint were used to form the bodies of Buick cars out of sheet metal, which were then shipped to assembly plants across the country. If GM succeeded in relocating the dies to less militant factories in Grand Rapids and Pontiac, workers realized, the company could continue limited production during a strike and, just as important, begin transferring jobs to those factories as well. [2]

<2> Leaders, participants, and historians disagree about whether the dies story was the occasion for or the cause of the strike (probably the former), but on the strength of that story hundreds of GM workers took control of the enormous Fisher No. 1 factory and the smaller, adjacent Fisher No. 2, and thus began what would turn into a 44 day "sit-down" strike to win national recognition for their disorganized and fledging union, the United Auto Workers. During those 44 days, strikers and their supporters would efficiently distribute food and supplies, inspire other GM workers across the country to strike or to occupy their factories, nearly freeze to death, rebuff attempts by police and company agents to retake the buildings, hold funerals for workers shot while picketing, seize yet another, still more important factory, and after prolonged negotiations finally force General Motors to recognize the UAW as their sole bargaining agent.

<3> If Flint was the making of the UAW, then Flint was also the making of UAW song and poetry. While workers were still sitting down, The United Auto Worker, the newspaper of the UAW, published some of the songs - "After the Battle," "The Fisher Strike," "Sit Down" - workers and their auxiliaries had composed (usually by adapting popular songs) in the course of the strike. "Though basing their verse on other tunes," the editors of The United Auto Worker commented, "the songs, nevertheless, express a collective creative activity that is rare enough in American life." "There is no reason to believe," they added, "that original tunes will not be created also as our composers gain confidence." The editors of the United Auto Worker also linked this musical expression to the "veritable up-surge of creative activity along the lines of letter-writing, poetry, drawing, etc. among our people since the strikes began." "But what work has already been done," the UAW editors predicted, "is only a slight indication of the vast creative resources possessed by the American working people" ("Strike Songs").

<4> At least in the field of poetry, the editors' prediction was correct. From its origins in the Flint-sit down strike of 1936-1937 to the long and violent campaign to organize Ford workers in the years that followed, the United Auto Worker published some 110 poems and song-poems written by workers and organizers. Nor were autoworkers alone among American working people in their "veritable up-surge of creative activity." Throughout the 1930s, but especially in the latter half of that decade, when the Congress of Industrial Organization broke with the American Federation of Labor and began its campaign to organize the unorganized, thousands of workers - not just autoworkers but also miners, steelworkers, rubber workers, sailors, longshoremen, textile workers, and men and women from almost every key industry and craft - would write poems and see them printed in their union newspapers.

<5> In an anthology devoted to these poets, I try to survey the whole of their achievement. [3] In this essay, however, I would like to sacrifice such a long and wide view in order to focus on the poetry of a single union, the United Auto Workers. I do so for several reasons. First, in terms of poetry, with the possible exception of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the UAW cultivated more poets and published more poems than any other union in the 1930s. Second, by reproducing these poems and reconstructing their historical and political contexts, I would like to show not just that workers used poetry to articulate their ideas and opinions and thus continued the nineteenth century tradition of worker poetry and song, but also to show the specific role that poetry played in the formation of a given union. [4] Rather than surveying the poetry of many different unions, we can better understand the cultural work of labor poetry by attending to a specific place and time - in this case, autoworkers' campaign for a union in the industrial Midwest. Finally, and despite all the recoveries and rediscoveries that the work of Cary Nelson, Alan Wald, Barbara Foley, and Michael Denning has inspired in the last two decades, by revisiting these United Auto Worker poems I want to emphasize that much recovery work still remains to be done, especially in recovering and rediscovering the literature of those who did not publish in conventional literary journals or books and who may not have even considered themselves primarily poets or writers but who nevertheless, as this essay tries to demonstrate, wrote much that is crucial to our understanding of the period generally and left-literary culture specifically. Indeed, the work of these amateur writers may help us to further the project Cary Nelson started us along two decades ago, which (as I see it) is to write the history of a genre (in this case poetry) in the period between the two world wars. Such an approach would organize the period not by the names of poets, canonical or utterly forgotten, but by the various uses to which many different people put the genre of poetry during this and other periods as well. In what follows, I argue that one of the uses that UAW poets made of poetry during the late 1930s was to invite their readers to imagine themselves not as consumers, as their employers, their culture, and their advertising more and more prompted them to, but as workers.

 

I: John Autoworker Speaks

<6> In his memoir of the early years of the UAW, Heroes of Unwritten Story, Henry Kraus, who at the time also edited the United Auto Worker, recalls that in 1936 he and Bob Travis, lead organizer of the UAW in Flint, "picked up a worker who was waiting for a bus near the Fisher plant. He was a young chap but looked all done in." Kraus reports their conversation:

"Working overtime?" Travis asked him.

"Yup."

"How is it?"

"Terrible."

"Speedup, huh?"

"That's it."

"I never worked in a plant," [Kraus] said, "what's it like?"

"I don't know," the young fellow searched for words. "You just get to feeling so poohed out you don't know if you're sick or exhausted or just plain disgusted." (Kraus 238)

Krause goes on to recall that "the little encounter gave me my lead [for the initial issue of the Flint Auto Worker]: the speedup. Everyone I spoke to in Flint had the same story to tell. You did not hear nearly as many complaints about wages. It was always the speedup, the horrible speedup. Flint workers had a peculiar grey, jaundiced look that long rest after the exhausting week did not efface. The speedup was the one element that found a common ground of resentment. It was the speedup that organized Flint" (Kraus 238).

<7> I cite this exchange between the editor of the United Auto Worker and a Flint factory worker because the speed-up did not just organize Flint, it also organized many of the poems written in Flint and for the UAW organizing drive. Throughout the 1930s, Ralph H. Marlatt wrote a weekly column ("Nuts and Bolts") that appeared in Kraus's United Auto Worker. He frequently began those columns with poems, many of them inspired by Carl Sandburg, including the following, untitled evocation of work on the assembly line. Here is Marlatt's poem:

Have you ever worked on a line puttin' out five thousand bodies a day?

Then, brother, you ain't ever been to hell;

The bell rings and the line starts,

Bend, lift, hammer, screw,

No stopping now 'till noon, or 'til you drop,

Bend, lift, hammer, screw,

And the sweat pouring into your eyes and mouth

'Til your lips are puffed with the salt of it,

Your dripping hair hangs in your eyes

And you can't take time to push it back,

And your belly turns over at the smell of garlick,

Turns sick at the stench of human bodies,

Turns sick at guys spittin' tobacco juice and blood,

Bend, lift, hammer, screw,

Get production, the eternal cry,

Your back feels like it's about to bust

And you can't straighten up or stretch,

And the line keeps pushin' bodies at you,

And there ain't no way you can hold 'em back,

Bend, lift, hammer, screw,

Oh, Christ, where is that bell,

Bend, lift, hammer, screw,

Four hours of it and then fifteen minutes to eat,

Bolt a hunk of bread and at it again,

Bend, lift, hammer, screw;

Have you ever worked on a line puttin' out five thousand bodies a day?

Then, brother, you ain't ever been to hell.

Formally, Marlatt's poem is quite ingenious. The repetition of "Bend, lift, hammer, screw," arriving, like car bodies on an assembly line, every few seconds, continually interrupts the speaker's monologue, so that the speaker is repeatedly surrendering control over the progress of the poem to the assembly line, the arrival of another job, and the need to "Bend, lift, hammer, screw." And "control" is the key word here. As Harry Braverman observes in his classic study, Labor and Monopoly Capital, "Control has been the essential feature of management throughout its history" (8), and Marlatt's poem attempts, among other aims, to represent how management's will to control disciplines workers subjected to it. Few did more to advance management's will to control than Frederick Winslow Taylor, the theorist and tireless proponent for scientific management in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, and it is worth revisiting that history in order to understand just how much speed-up poems like Marlatt's reflect and react against management's will to control. Taylor's "system," according to Braverman, "was simply a means for management to achieve control of the actual mode of performance of every labor activity, from the simplest to the most complicated" (90). This system meant breaking down every job into its constituent physical gestures, eliminating wasteful movement, prescribing a certain set of actions that would most efficiently accomplish the task, and then timing each newly managed activity to determine maximum possible output. Workers' pay would then be determined by how closely they matched that maximum possible output. Work thus scientifically managed, Taylor promised, would eliminate waste mostly by eliminating "soldiering," his term for a workers' natural inclination to laziness.

<8> Ford's conveyor belt, introduced in 1914, sought the same sort of control over workers' labor as scientific management, though it did so without the need for the close supervision of workers that scientific management sometimes required. In principle, the conveyor belt moved partially assembled cars past fixed workers, who performed simple, unskilled operations ("Bend, lift, hammer, screw") as the car passed their stations (Braverman 147). [5] Braverman argues that in addition to undermining the skilled bicycle and carriage makers who built the first automobiles, the endless conveyor belt undermined (even more so than scientific management) workers' control over the form, content, and especially the pace of their work. Instead of foremen having to intimidate, cajole, or bribe workers into working harder and faster, management could simply make conveyor belts run at whatever speed they chose, effectively forcing upon workers whatever levels of output management desired. Through use of the conveyor belt, management "could now double and triple the rate at which operations had to be performed and thus subject its workers to an extraordinary intensity of labor" (Braverman 148).

<9> In the coming decades, as Kraus's exchange attests, workers would invariably refer to this on-going intensity of labor as the "speed-up," and Marlatt's poem brilliantly demonstrates the requirements and cruelties of that system. Marlatt's assembly line worker, for example, does not choose to put out "five thousand bodies a day," nor does any one really make him; rather, that decision over the pace and output of work has been chosen for him and expressed in the pace of the assembly line. In other words, "Get production" may be "the eternal cry," but the ultimate enforcer of that cry is the assembly line itself. Moreover, in order to meet those production levels, the assembly line prescribes certain gestures ("bend, lift, hammer, screw") but, just as importantly, it proscribes other gestures. By setting the conveyor belt at a certain speed, management can eliminate so-called "wasted" motions by not allowing workers the time to perform them. Once the bell rings, Marlatt's persona cannot "take the time" to push back the "dripping hair [that] hangs in your eyes"; neither can he "straighten up or stretch" his back, since (as he points out) "the line keeps pushin' bodies at you, /And there ain't no way you can hold 'em back,/ Bend, lift, hammer, screw." Pushing back hair or stretching a back, from management's perspective, represents "wasted" motions not geared towards production. One of the points of Marlatt's poem, though, is that those gestures may not be wasteful for workers, but absolutely necessary. What all this adds up to, Marlatt's poem suggests, is that workers experience the assembly line as a loss of control: not just over the output or pace of their work, as in Braverman, but also over their own bodies. In the poem, as on the assembly line, the car "bodies" speeding down the assembly line have usurped in importance the human bodies employed to assemble them.

<10> Other United Auto Worker poems from this period voice similar resentments. Not all auto work could be transferred onto a conveyor belt, but the principles behind the conveyor belt could nevertheless apply to all automotive work. For work that could not be shifted to an assembly line, like cutting and stamping parts, foremen and supervisors could nevertheless employ similar principles of control over time and bodies in order to ensure that workers heeded the eternal cry, "get production." "Pressure," by arguably one of the most formally inventive of the UAW poets, who wrote under the pseudonym POLL, describes that much more "human" form of exploitation by adopting the persona of a foreman crying, essentially, get production:

come on there cutter . . .

set the job up . . .

fix it tight . . .

use the fan . . .

let it blow full cold . . .

here's castor oil . . .

and grease

to help the bearings

best it can . . .

then push it . . .

push it . . .

push it . . .

freeze the machine solid . . .

if you must . . .

but get the job out . . .

fast . . .

double quick . . .

5000 men stand waiting . . .

5000 hours a'wasting . . .

overhead

mounting . . .

mounting . . .

mounting . . .

come on there cutter . . .

let the shavings fly . . .

cut the steel . . .

16th by 16th . . .

push the motor . . .

grease the bearings . . .

let the fan blow . . .

push it . . .

push it . . .

for gods sake cutter . . .

get the job out . . .

As we will see in another of POLL's poems, his use of short lines speeds up the pace of the poem, making it almost as frenetic as the work described. That work, done by cutters, involved cutting and forming the thousands of metal parts line workers then assembled into cars. The job depended on skilled workers, called tool and die men, who would build the dies and set up the machines that unskilled or semi-skilled operators - cutters - would then use to cut or press different parts. While they tended to work at their own machines and not on the assembly line, cutters and other machine operators were nevertheless subject to the logic of the speed-up that Marlatt describes. As "pressure" suggests, non-assembly line work often exacted enormous scrutiny since the profits of a company in the labor intensive auto industry turned largely on "the reduction of unit labor costs to their lowest possible level" (Lichtenstein 106). A good deal of GM's profit came from their cutthroat style of management, which demanded that heads of different divisions within the corporation achieve a 20 per cent rate of return lest they lose their jobs (Bernstein 511). Since labor was one of the few areas where managers could vary the costs of input, the system demanded that management and foremen squeeze ever more production from their workers in ever less time, thus increasing productivity and lessening the relative cost of what POLL describes as the "overhead . . ./ mounting . . ./ mounting . . ./ mounting . . . ." Indeed, workers liked to say that GM President William Knudsen, the man in charge of production at Ford in the 1920s and GM in the 1930s, "knew how to shout "Hurry up!" in fifteen languages" (Lichtenstein 106). The difference between Marlatt's assembly line poem and POLL's cutter poem is that the latter requires someone to shout "Hurry up!" while the former demonstrates how the assembly line translates the spoken "Hurry up!" into a mode of production. Workers in both poems, however, suffer from the physical and mental excesses of that imperative, regardless of its spoken or mechanized form.

<11> Both these poems explore how the speedup, whether experienced on the assembly line or from foremen, affects workers subjected to it. Their conclusions tend to support Henry Kraus's, who saw in it "a common ground of resentment" and an issue that could organize workers into a collective organization that could, as the UAW eventually would, combat it. The common grounds for resentment about the speed-up, these poems also suggest, is not just the pace or the shouting, but more specifically workers' loss of control over their time and their bodies. In other words, scientific management and the conveyor belt may have begun by attempting to control the labor process, but in order to do that they had to control workers' bodies ("Bend, lift, hammer, screw") and workers' time ("push it . . ./ push it . . ./ push it . . . .") Instead of merely exploiting their labor power, then, automobile factories remade that labor power by subjecting its constituent parts - bodies and time - to an intense and minute supervision and control. If this critique of automobile work sounds familiar, that is because these worker-poets could eventually claim heady theoretical company in the figure of Michel Foucault, who later arrives at very similar conclusions about the factory as a site for the production of what he calls "docile bodies": bodies that had become "the object and target of power" (136). "Time," Foucault famously notes of these disciplines, "penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power" (152). [6] For these disciplines to function, Foucault notes, they must rely on "hierarchical observation": "an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to induce effects of power, and in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible" (171). In other words, disciplines must "oversee" ("supervise" but also, qua Foucault's title, "surveiller") the bodies they wish to control, just as they must subject those bodies to a discipline of time.

 

II: "Fordism is Fascism."

<12> "Is it surprising," Foucault concludes this section of Discipline and Punish by asking, "that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, and hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" (228). Based on their poems, auto workers would not think such resemblances at all surprising. Indeed, workers not only had altogether too much cause to note the similarities between their factories and prisons, they also had some cause to note their factory's resemblance to fascist police states. Another poet from this period, John Paine, adorned his poem "King Henry the V-8th" with a picture of Henry Ford's boyish face against a backdrop of two swastikas. Ford had it coming. In addition to his well-publicized - indeed self-published - anti-Semitism and support for Nazi causes, Henry Ford's enormous, self-contained River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, just outside of Detroit, did, as Nelson Lichtenstein observes, "have a fascist odor about it" (82). [7] Most of that odor emanated from what Lichtenstein calls the Italianesque intrigue that ruled labor relations at Ford and GM, the corporations' control over local officials, judges, and police, and, lastly, Ford's infamous Service Department, which, as Lichtenstein further notes, "replicated inside the Ford factories many features of the police states of central Europe" (82). "It's almost unbelievable the way Ford was run," Archie Acciaca, a worker hired in Ford's Dearborn plant in 1935, recalled. "It was a real gestapo set-up. . . ." (qtd. in Stepan-Norris 62).

<13> Many UAW poets objected to this set-up as well, exposing what John Paine in his poem called "the embalmed state" of civil and economic rights that characterized Ford and GM factories in Dearborn and Flint. Chief among those objecting was the poet of "pressure," POLL, whose poem, "you work tomorrow," describes the favoritism and everyday intrigues that determined layoffs in the quasi-police state of the auto factory. As Sidney Fine notes in his history of the sit-down strike, "Second only to the speed-up among the grievances of automobile workers was the irregularity of unemployment" (60). Because the automobile industry insisted on changing models every fall in order to stimulate sales, a majority of autoworkers (above 90 percent) spent anywhere from three to six months of the year without work. This irregularity of employment meant that while automobile workers enjoyed high hourly wages, which the industry never tired of publicizing, their yearly wage earnings barely exceeded those of full time employees in other industries. "The annual layoff during the model change was always a menace to the security of the workers," another UAW poet, Clayton Fountain, later wrote in his autobiography, Union Guy (1949). "Along about June or July it started. The bosses would pick the men off a few at a time, telling them to stay home until they were notified to come back" (41). And since "there was no unemployment compensation to tide them over until they were rehired," Fountain observes, "it was customary for auto workers to go broke during [the] layoff" (41).

<14> Prior to the Depression, many laid-off auto workers could find other jobs to hold them over (Fountain sold vacuum cleaners), but after the Depression those jobs had become even scarcer. And without a system of seniority, auto workers believed, with some cause, that, as Sidney Fine puts it, "it was the foremen who really determined the order of layoff and rehiring and that favoritism played a large part in his decision as to who worked and who did not" (60). "There was no rhyme or reason to the selection of the fortunate ones chosen to continue working," Clayton Fountain complained. "The foreman had the say. If he happened to like you, or if you sucked around him and did him favors - or if you were one of the bastards who worked like hell and turned out more production - you might be picked to work a few weeks longer than the next guy" (41). POLL's "you work tomorrow" dramatizes this irrational but maddening process by focusing on a worker who is picked to remain employed even when everyone else is notified of their layoff. Here is the somewhat long, but nevertheless compelling poem in full. As in "pressure," note how POLL uses short, heavily enjambed lines to draw out the action (really the inaction) of the poem and, thus, to heighten the drama of the advancing day:

my shift

checks in at eight . . .


this time

the checkers saying . . .

"no more work

unless notified" . . .

that's a way

to begin a day . . .

with the future stretching

out in emptiness . . .

and your wife's face

growing troubled . . .

your children

going silent

before you . . .

and only the mailman's coming

to mark off the days

until the recall comes . . .


nine

ten

eleven o'clock . . .

and the work on your machine

fades in the fog of your desire

for that tap on the shoulder

your super will give you

if

you work tomorrow . . .


and you can't get your job right

and you crack your foot

with a tool at the crib . . .

because your hands won't hold . . .


noon . . .

check out for lunch . . .

with your food all hard

and your coffee all dry in your throat . . .


check in . . .

with the checker still saying . . .

"no more work

unless notified" . . .

one

two

three o'clock . . .


there's no more use

trying to work . . .

just watch the super . . .

up the aisles and down . . .

but he never stops . . .

and you begin to wonder

at the use of it all . . .

let your children want . . .

let your wife go mad with worrying . . .

let the landlord wave writs in your face . . .

god for the chance

at warring in spain . . .

let's go to china

and fight the japs . . .

let's do anything

but wait

wait

wait . . .

for the super

to tap you on the shoulder

and say the words . . .

"you work tomorrow"

just that

"you work tomorrow" . . .


and here he is again

and you want to turn

and laugh in his face . . .

only he's tapping you on the shoulder

and leaning over

to say

"you work tomorrow" . . .


and your knees are trembling . . .

and there's sweat all over you . . .

and you want to puke your guts out . . .

but the whistle blows . . .

and you turn . . .

and there's joe . . .

packing his tools in his case . . .

and hans . . .

and almost every other man . . .

in the goddam place . . .


what should it matter to you . . .

you've got your notice . . .

but pull your hat

down over your face . . .

and grab your lunch box . . .

and hurry the hell

out of the place . . .


to breath [sic] the open air

and look up at all the stacks . . .

smoking . . .

and the factory stretching out

in all directions . . .


and the men

pouring out of all the doors . . .

with their tool boxes

under their arms . . .

but you . . .

you work tomorrow . . .

In the first part of "you work tomorrow," the speaker desires to be one of "the fortunate ones," as Fountain called them, waiting anxiously and purposelessly "for that tap on the shoulder/ your super will give you/ if/ you work tomorrow. . . ." When that tap is not forthcoming, the speaker resigns himself to his fate, wondering "at the use of it all" and, since he cannot fight fascism at home (by confronting his foreman), he imagines fighting fascism abroad: "god for the chance/ at warring in spain/ let's go to china/ and fight the japs." Before the speaker can give up, volunteer for the American Lincoln Brigade, or (his newest plan) laugh in the foreman's face, though, the super is indeed "tapping [him] on the shoulder/ and leaning over/ to say/ 'you work tomorrow.'" His reaction to the news, however, is a kind of bodily purge: his knees tremble, he sweats, and he wants to vomit. That visceral bodily reaction signals the ironic turn the poem takes in its concluding lines. Instead of celebrating his luck at being one of the fortunate ones chosen to continue working, the speaker eventually regrets his fortune since it isolates him from the other, unfortunate workers. Alone among men not "packing his tools in his case," the speaker hides beneath the bill of his hat and flees the factory, only to be confronted with a vista of smokestacks and factory buildings that reminds us - and the speaker of the poem as well - that this scene is being repeated in countless factories and workplaces across the industrial landscape. By the conclusion of the poem, then, the words the speaker once longed for the foreman to speak - "you work tomorrow" - are now spoken by the worker himself and in a tone of self-contempt: "but you . . ./ you work tomorrow . . . ." In addition to being quite brilliantly executed, the poem exposes how the "fortune" of one worker depends upon the misfortune of other workers; moreover, when one realizes this, those feelings of fortune can quickly change into feelings of shame, revulsion, and even guilt. More generally, by highlighting these feelings, the poem exposes the insufficiency of any purely individualist (only you work tomorrow) solution to the problem of layoffs and unemployment.

<15> For workers to even begin to imagine collective rather than individual solutions to these problems, however, they had to organize, and there too they ran into a kind of fascism. [8] As part of their campaign to organize Ford workers in the late 1937, for example, the UAW pasted billboards at a busy Detroit streetcar exchange that read, "Fordism is Fascism! Unionism is Americanism!" (Lichtenstein 82). [9] That they could not post these billboards in a more logical place - outside the Rouge factory in Dearborn, for example - in fact made the billboard's point. A few months earlier, the Dearborn City Council passed an ordinance that prohibited leafleting (and billboards) in "congested areas" of the city, including, of course, the congested area outside the River Rouge factory (Stepan-Norris 41). The ordinance demonstrated how Ford used his control over local government and police to intimidate would-be organizers and would-be organized Ford workers. [10] Paul Boatin, an organizer who began work at the Rouge in 1925, remembered that "People . . . got slugged, got beaten up, got arrested distributing literature on Miller Road to Ford Workers. . . . If you distributed literature on Miller Road, you were arrested. Some of us went in and out of jail almost every other week" (qtd. in Stepan-Norris 53).

<16> These ordinances (and their conscientious enforcement by Dearborn police) inspired a number of poems by UAW organizers and workers, including Murray Roth's "Dearborn Hospitality." In the months after the Battle of the Overpass, Stepan and Keitlin note, nearly a thousand unionists were arrested for distributing leaflets, but few spent more than a few hours in jail, and none had formal charges filed against them since the ordinance would clearly not hold up in an appeals court. Roth's poem satirizes the results:

I'm a convict doing time

For a very vicious crime.

Yes - they caught me in Henry's foreign land!

Though they shivered in their pants,

Fifty coppers took a chance

As they seized the paper weapons in my hand.


After much ado and fuss,

In the mayor's special bus

I was driven to a hoosegow [11] down the street

When I tried to pay my fare

To the man who drove me there,

I was told that it was Mayor Carey's treat.


I was taken to my doom

In an overcrowded room . . .

To a cell where many others shared my sin.

As they placed me in this cell

Every man began to yell . . .

"Show your union card or we won't let you in!"


I don't blame the boys in blue

For the dirty work they do.

They must do their job the same as you or I.

When they free me from this pen

I'll be coming back again,

For I love this Dearborn hospitality.

"Dearborn Hospitality" works on a simple but witty conceit that recasts being arrested and imprisoned as an all-expense paid vacation. This sort of conceit, combined with Roth's inventive rhymes ("bus" and "fuss," "doom" and "room") recalls many Industrial Worker of the World poems and songs, especially T-Bone Slim's hilarious "The Popular Wobbly." As in that song, the joke is why police officers, judges, and wardens would devote so much attention to someone so seemingly gentle and harmless. [12] But of course the police and mayor devote so much "attention" to Wobblies and worker-organizers because they know how dangerous and harmful they in fact are to business as usual. To the police and the mayor, leaflets are "paper weapons" and passing them out is "a vicious crime" that makes fifty cops "shiver" in their pants. Like many IWW poems, too, the poem recalls the Wobbly practice of filling the jails. Because none of the "guests" in Roth's poem will have charges filed against them, they can remake the jail cell into a space of worker solidarity, demanding to see prisoners' union cards before entering.

<17> Nevertheless, Ford's fascism continued apace, not just in the factories, city council chambers, and jails, but, as the anonymous "Ford Sunday Evening Hour" suggests, in the form of propaganda over the airwaves as well. The poem's title refers to the Ford-sponsored radio program of the same name, which broadcast classical music out of Dearborn, Michigan to an enormous national (as well as local) radio audience. "Ford Sunday Evening Hour" also featured the host of the program, W.J. Cameron, giving "talks" on a range of subjects - patriotism, holidays, America - and on what he called the "so-called" labor and social problems of the 1930s. The opening stanzas of the poem track how the program, with its mix of propaganda and classical music, registers on one especially class conscious listener:

Between dark and daylight on Sunday,

When the night is beginning to lower,

Comes a wonderful radio program,

The Ford Sunday Evening Hour.


I hear from my seat in the corner

The music so soft and so sweet,

The voice of a wonderful tenor

And life seems full and complete.


Then we listen to Ford's Mr. Cameron

And the guest star who prostitutes art,

Who is paid to make beautiful music

And buy Henry's way to our heart.


But in spite of the wonderful music

And in spite of the soft spoken lies,

I know they are plotting and planning

To take me by surprise.


They fairly engulf me with music,

My senses they try to o'erpower,

And they try to ruin my judgment

With their wonderful sympathy hour.


Then a sudden hush of the music

And life seems full and complete - 

Then Cameron steps up to the mouthpiece

And over the air he bleats.


He condemns the unions and labor,

And when he rants no more

A beautiful symphony concert

Has been spoiled by an arrogant bore.

By themselves, the first seven stanzas of "Ford Sunday Evening Hour" exaggeratedly confirm some of the more baleful predictions (one thinks of Herbert Marcuse or other Frankfurt School thinkers) that the effects of mass culture might have on working-class consciousness, even when, as in "Ford Sunday Evening Hour," mass culture acted as a medium for the distribution of high culture. The listener of the program knows "they" - whether Ford, Cameron, or the musicians he does not say - "are plotting and planning" against him, so he melodramatically struggles to maintain his "senses" and "judgment" above the enticingly "wonderful radio program" that plays "music so soft and so sweet" and that promises to make "life" seem "full and complete."

<18> The program does not succeed in making life seem full and complete, though, mostly because "the soft-spoken lies" and "rants" interrupt the music and remind the listener who in fact is paying these pipers and who is therefore calling the tunes. Since the Ford Motor Company, because of "many requests" (5) printed in booklet form the talks W.J. Cameron delivered on-air, we have a good idea of the content of the "soft-spoken lies" and "rants" that save the listener from having his senses overwhelmed and his judgment ruined. The talk given on May 1, 1938, for example, roughly two weeks before "Ford Sunday Evening Hour" appeared in the United Auto Worker, consisted, as did many of Cameron's talks, of a homespun brief against the Roosevelt Administration and its New Deal reforms. Cameron objected to the New Deal because it supposedly restrained the beneficent ambitions of management and business, harming not just business but ultimately workers and civilization itself. Discussing the continuingly depressed American economy, Cameron observed that "The best recovery up to tonight has been made by those nations whose governments had least to do with it. In those nations whose governments have intervened most," he added, meaning the American government, "recovery has been delayed" (248-49). For Cameron (as for Henry Ford himself and GM President Alfred Sloan, both of whom testified repeatedly before Congress to similar effect), the Wagner Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act (two pieces of New Deal legislation) represented the worst of "government intervention." [13] While those pieces of legislation worked their way to the Supreme Court, employers like Ford and Sloan ignored them out of the belief that, like other sections of the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, the Supreme Court would eventually rule them unconstitutional inroads on states' rights and freedom of contract. In the meantime, they (and those in the media sympathetic to the plight of business) conducted a propaganda campaign against them - to which "Ford Sunday Evening Hour" contributes. [14] "The leg-irons must be taken off the nation's productive forces," Cameron insisted in an earlier talk, "the stigma of 'social enemy' must be publicly erased from the brow of American enterprise; prescriptive regulations must be totally expunged" (226). According to Cameron, this emancipation of business from the cruel hand of government would benefit not just businesses but workers as well. Once freed from their "shackles," American enterprise would return to its business of creating "the nation's wealth" and raising wages, which, Cameron concluded in September of 1937, could only come from "better management" and not "outside pressure," by which Cameron meant the C.I.O. , the U.A.W., and the federal government.

<19> According to Cameron, Americans and their elected government also displayed enormous ignorance in other matters as well, especially those matters that affected the profits of the Ford Motor Company. "To believe that one person has less because another person has more, that one's man success means another man's failure," Cameron began a talk that touched on progressive taxation in February 1938, "is a sign of economic illiteracy" (217). Moreover, what misguided critics called the "speed-up" could not exist - and certainly did not exist at Ford - since it would (in a somewhat head-spinning tautology) violate the principles of "good management" (164). Nor according to Cameron did the assembly line mean that men worked "faster or longer," only that a single man could now do much more work without expending more energy. Whatever complaints people had of the assembly line or speed-up came from the fact that (as Henry Ford had concluded in 1920 in response to similar charges) some men "were fitted for the assembly line," and some just were not (165). [15] But there was nothing wrong with the assembly line itself. Indeed, quite the opposite. "More than any other single method," Cameron observed, the assembly line "has given the American family a higher household standard and the American workingman a higher wage, than are possible anywhere else on earth" (163-64).

<20> It is these "soft-spoken lies" as the speaker of "Ford Sunday Evening Hour" calls them, that "save" his judgment and senses from drowning in the "music so soft and so sweet" of the Ford Sunday Evening Hour. The poem thus dramatizes how difficult it would be for workers to remember who they were and what their interests were even during the most turbulent years of the Great Depression, especially without the presence of arrogant bores like Cameron to remind them. Henry Ford's "Sunday Evening Hour," for example, like much of mass culture then cohering in the 1930s, attempts to transcend class by hailing everyone as consumers, not workers. Many of Cameron's talks, for example, warned against "unnatural" raising of wages - that is, raises that come as a result of pressure from unions or from government intervention - since when wages rise unnaturally, the prices of goods rise unnaturally as well, in which case, Cameron threatened, people will buy fewer things, production would decrease, employment would level off, and everyone would lose, including, Cameron implied, their jobs. The lesson, besides waiting for your boss to find the "natural" time for a raise, was to make people understand economic problems from the perspective of consumption and, finally, from the perspective of business. Only because of Cameron's rants and bleats, though, can the speaker of "Ford Sunday Evening Hour" reconstruct himself as a worker and not as a consumer of classical music or a consumer worried that his raise in wages might "unnaturally" raise prices.

<21> When the "arrogant bore" Cameron finishes, however, and "the strings of the music return," the listener is again in danger of lapsing back into a passive "peace and contentment." "But it seems that something is missing," the speaker observes, listening to the music once again, "There is something which life seems to lack," and the music, instead of dulling his judgment and sense, inspires a vision of the Ford Hunger March from six years earlier:

And somehow from out of the music

Come visions of days that are past,

And my peace and contentment all leave me,

It seems that they just cannot last.


Still I settle down in my armchair,

But I remember a day long ago

When Henry Ford's plant wasn't running

And the workers were out in the snow.


So they decided to go out to Dearborn,

And try to see Henry Ford,

To see if they couldn't find some way

To pay for their bed and their board.


But all of you know the story

How he met them with tear gas and guns

And workers were beaten and tear-gassed

By Bennet's stool pigeons and thugs.


And next day it came out in the papers

How a bunch of radical Reds

Had planned to take over the factory

And murder the Fords in their beds.


Now the music dies out in the distance,

They announce a lovely old hymn,

Giving all glory to God

And singing their praises to Him.

It is not at all surprising that the Ford Hunger March should intrude upon this worker's reverie since it remained one of the bloodiest and cruelest events of the Great Depression. In the spring of 1929, the Ford Motor Company employed 128,000 workers; by August of 1931, it had laid off over ninety thousand of them (Downs 22). On March 7, 1932, 3,000 protestors - most of them unemployed Ford workers organized by the Communist-led Auto Workers Union - marched from the outskirts of Detroit to the River Rouge plant in Dearborn "demanding jobs for laid-off Ford workers, a slowdown of the company's assembly line, and a halt to evictions of ex-Ford workers" (Bernstein 341). [16] As the marchers neared the plant, the Dearborn police threatened to arrest them if they did not turn back, a threat the marchers ignored, which led the police to fire tear gas at them. The marchers responded by throwing rocks and lumps of frozen dirt, and one protester with especially inspired aim knocked Harry Bennett unconscious. In response to that barrage, a battery of city police and company guards rushed from the Ford plant gates and opened point-blank fire on the crowd, killing four workers and wounding more than sixty. [17]

<22> The memory that the Ford who sponsored such brutality also sponsors the "Sunday Evening Hour" leads the speaker of the poem to question the propriety of his now sponsoring a "lovely old hymn" and "Giving all glory to God." "I wonder if those up in Heaven," the speaker asks, "Ever look down from above/ And see guns, tear-gas, and nightsticks/ A symbol of Ford's brand of love." Emboldened and embittered by the memory of "Ford's brand of love," the speaker challenges Ford directly:

Do you think, Henry Ford, you exploiter

You can buy with this kind of stuff

The thanks and goodwill of thousands

Who haven't nearly enough?


If you do, you're fooled plenty

For you are seeing the dawn of a day

When the workers will be educated,

For the CIO's here to stay.


So you might as well keep your music

And shut old Camerons' yap,

For while we enjoy your music

We haven't time for your crap.


And although I hear your good music

I remember that day long ago - 

So keep all your love and your music,

Just give us the CIO.


So we'll stick in the union forever

Yes, forever and a day,

Till the power of Ford has vanished

And the workers have gained a new day.

The struggle for the worker-listener in "Ford Sunday Evening Hour" is to recall that the cash for this hour long document of (mass reproduced) civilization comes from the barbarism of firing tear gas and guns at unemployed and unarmed workers - that is, from those days long ago. [18] The listener in the poem manages to remember, to hear the gunshots and the hiss of tear gas behind the classical music and lovely old hymns, and the recollection of those barbarisms inspire a profound and newfound resentment against Henry Ford the "exploiter." The recollection also inspires a renewed desire to depose the "power of Ford" with "the CIO," by which workers might gain "a new day" and usher in a new sort of civilization, one perhaps less tainted by barbarism, Cameron's "yap," and Ford's "crap" but still with plenty of good music.

 

III: Real, Inner Truths

<23> In many ways, "Ford Sunday Evening Hour" is an exemplary UAW poem and, for that matter, an exemplary union poem. "Ford Sunday Evening Hour" is an exemplary poem because like most of the poems I have reproduced and discussed in this essay, it serves to remind workers - through all the noise and soft-spoken lies - of who they were and who their adversary was. They were workers, sped-up and abused, and their adversary was their employers, who, when it came down to it, would just as soon throw them in jail and fire tear gas or guns at them as negotiate an "unnatural" raise in wages or allow organizers to help them form a union.

<24> Moreover, reminding workers of their own interests and those opposed to their interests was no small feat, not even for the decade Alfred Kazin called the "lean and angry Thirties" (qtd. in Barnard 15) or that Michael Denning called "the age of the C.I.O." (xiv). In addition to the sit-down strikes, the unemployed councils, and John Reed Clubs, the 1930s also witnessed the consolidation of modern American consumer society, which, as "Ford Sunday Evening Hour" suggests, had a stake in obscuring workers from themselves and their adversaries. In The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance, Rita Barnard explains her seemingly contradictory title with "the fact that one can detect in the culture of the thirties the now-familiar outlines of a society of consumption - this despite the painful national experience of scarcity and suffering, and despite the emphasis of a good portion of the decade's literary work on labor and production" (3). The society of consumption, as "Ford Sunday Evening Hour" warns, tends to hail its subjects as consumers, whether of music or goods, and not as workers.

<25> To be sure, a society of consumption does not necessarily entail the end of working-class organization. [19] That said, and despite the general "laboring of culture" that Michael Denning sees in this period, the culture and, even more so, the advertising industries that developed in the 1930s did not always or even usually encourage workers to think of themselves as workers. One of the leading copywriters of the 1920s, Helen Woodward, for example, revealed just how far removed from the spheres of production this world of consumption would have to exist if it were to succeed. She advised her copywriting colleagues that "if you are advertising any product, never see the factory in which it is made. Don't know too much about it. Don't watch the people at work. Just know all you can about the finished article and the man who is going to buy it, and the conditions of selling in the business. Because, you see, when you know the truth about anything, the real, inner truth - it is very hard to write the surface fluff which sells it" (qtd. in Barnard 33).

<26> Despite the risk of nostalgia or epistemological naiveté, I nevertheless want to argue that a poem like "Ford Sunday Evening Hour" and other UAW poems like it attempted to remind the auto workers who read them of real, inner truths, of what it was like to work on a line putting out five thousand bodies a day, or to work tomorrow when no one else would. Whether published in the United Auto Worker or any of the other union newspapers that blossomed during the 1930s, worker-poetry could help keep those truths about workers and their real interests audible above the soft-spoken lies of radio programs and visible through the "superficial fluff" of advertising. [20] Those truths might have made it harder for advertisers to sell things - cars, for example - but they remained absolutely necessary if one wanted to change things: the factories where cars were made and the working and living conditions of those who made them.

 

Works Cited

Barnard, Rita. The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Benjamin, Walter. "These on the Philosophy of History." Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1968. 253-264.

Bernstein, Irving. Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-141. Boston: Houghlin Mifflin, 1969.

Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review P, 1974.

Cameron, W.J. Ford Sunday Evening Hour Talks 1934-1939. Dearborn: Ford Motor Company, 1939.

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1997.

Downs, Linda Bank. Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals. New York: Norton, 1999.

Fine, Sidney. Sit Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936-1937. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1969.

"Ford Sunday Evening Hour" United Auto Worker. 13 May 1939, 7.

Fountain, Clayton W. Union Guy. New York: Viking, 1949.

Freeman, Joshua et al., eds. Who Built America: Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society. Vol. 2. New York: Pantheon, 1992.

Kraus, Henry. Heroes of Unwritten Story: The UAW, 1934-1939. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993.

Lichtenstein, Nelson. Walter Ruethee: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997.

Marlatt, Ralph H. "Have you ever worked on a line putting out five thousand bodies a day?" United Auto Worker. 8 October 1938, 8.

Marsh, John, ed. You Work Tomorrow: An Anthology of American Labor Poetry, 1929-1941. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2007.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage, 1995.

Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory. Madison: U of Wisconsin P., 1989.

Paine, John. "Henry the V8th." United Auto Worker. 14 September 1937, 8.

Phillips, Utah. "The Popular Wobbly." By T-Bone Slim. We Have Fed You All for a Thousand Years. Rounder, 1993.

POLL. "pressure." United Auto Worker. 13 May, 1939, 7.

---. "you work tomorrow." United Auto Worker. 20 May 1939, 7.

Roth, Murray. "Dearborn Hospitality." United Auto Worker. 12 February 1938, 8.

Stepan-Norris, Judith and Maurice Zeitlin, eds. Talking Union. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996.

"Strike Songs: Battle, Victory, Joy," United Auto Worker, January 1937, 7.

Thomas, Keith, ed. The Oxford Book of Work. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

 

Notes

[1] I have relied on Irving Bernstein's account of the sit-down strike in his Turbulent Years and Sidney Fine's in Sit Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936-1937 (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1969). [^]

[2] The Fisher No. 1 manufactured all of the bodies for Buick cars, in addition to parts for the Pontiac and Olds models, leading one historian of the strike (Fine) to estimate that together with the Cleveland Fisher Body Plant, which two days earlier had gone on strike, "perhaps three-fourths of GM's production was dependent on these two plants" (143). They were, Henry Kraus reports, "'mother plants,' according to GM terminology, responsible for the fabrication of the greater portion of Chevrolet and other body parts, which were then shipped in knock-down form to assembly plants throughout the country" (242). Such centralization gave workers at the factory an enormous advantage. If GM refused to negotiate with strikers and wait out a strike, as it had done in the past, the corporation would sacrifice millions of dollars in lost production just as the market for new cars promised to improve.[^]

[3] See You Work Tomorrow: An Anthology of American Labor Poetry, 1929-1941. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2007. [^]

[4] As Cary Nelson argued in Repression and Recovery, "for texts previously ignored or belittled, our greatest appreciative act may be to give them fresh opportunities for an influential life"; those texts "can gain that new life," he continues, "in part through an effort to understand what cultural work [they] may have been able to do in an earlier time" (14; 11). [^]

[5] Prior to 1914, craftsmen-mechanics (called "all-around men") built automobiles pretty much from the ground up, moving around the partially built cars that remained stationary on the workshop floor. [^]

[6] Foucault describes these disciplines (including that of the factory) in language that resonates with both Taylor and Marlatt. The "instrumental coding of the body," he notes, "consists of a breakdown of the total gesture into two parallel series: that of the parts of the body to be used (right hand, left hand, different fingers of the hand, knee, eye, elbow, etc.) and that of the parts of the object manipulated (barrel, notch, hammer, screw, etc.); then the two sets of parts are correlated together according to a number of simple gestures (rest, bend); lastly, it fixes the canonical succession in which each of these correlations occupies a particular place" (153). Among other disciplines, the factory "poses the principle of a theoretically ever-growing use of time: exhaustion rather than use; it is a question of extracting, from time, ever more available moments. This means that one must seek to intensify the use of the slightest moment, as if time, in its very fragmentation, were inexhaustible or as if, at least by an ever more detailed internal arrangement, one could tend towards an ideal point at which one maintained maximum speed and maximum efficiency" (154). [^]

[7] Henry Ford published The International Jew in 1920, which claimed, among other things, that Jewish bankers financed both the Communist Party and labor unions in order to weaken the industries and corporations Jewish industrialists wished to take over. See Stepan-Norris, Judith and Maurice Zeitlin, eds., Talking Union, 251. [^]

[8] Like most instances of the term, fascism may seem to be used here a little loosely. But if we define the term as a system of rigid, one-party rule characterized by forcible suppression of opposition and belligerent nationalism and racism, then Ford and his River Rouge complex matches the description. The Nazis thought so anyway. As Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin point out, Henry Ford would "be awarded the second highest Nazi decoration in a public ceremony in Dearborn on July 30, 1938." Ford also encouraged and provided funding for anti-Semitic evangelists (like Gerald K. Smith and Father Charles Coughlin) and various Nazi-front organizations like the National Workers League. Moreover, many autoworkers drew legitimate connections between Hitler's and Mussolini's suppression of trade unions and political opposition and the same practices at home. [^]

[9] The language of the UAW billboard might also invoke the slogan of the Communist Party's 1936 presidential election campaign, "Communism is Americanism." [^]

[10] "The Ford Motor Company," Nelson Lichtenstein observes, "had the police and Dearborn city officials under almost complete control" (82). "Ford's rule over Dearborn," Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin note, "was unfettered. The 'chief cogs' in his machine of domination over Dearborn's civic life for well over a decade were a leading municipal judge, who was Ford's close friend, and two former Ford security officers, one of whom was the city's chief of police throughout the late 1920s and 1930s" (4). Walter Dorosh, hired at Ford in 1934 and later president of UAW Local 600, called Dearborn "Ford City" (qtd. in Stepan-Norris 4). [^]

[11] A "hoosegow" is slang for a jail or guardhouse. It is a phonetic spelling of the Spanish word juzgar, "to judge." [^]

[12] Here is Utah Phillips's version of the song. Note especially the similarity between the treatment of the heroic cop in the second stanza of Slim's song and Roth's in the first. Both Slim and Roth's personae end up in jail as well, to tragic-comic effects:

They go wild simply wild over me,

Though I've never done them harm that I can see;

I'm as gentle as a lamb, but they take me for a ram,

They go wild simply wild over me.


Oh the "bull" he went wild over me,

And he held his gun where everyone could see;

He was breathing rather hard when he saw my union card,

He went wild simply wild over me.


Then the judge, he went wild over me,

And I plainly saw we never could agree;

So I let the man obey what his conscience had to say,

He went wild simply wild over me.


Oh the jailer, he went wild over me,

And he locked me up and threw away the key;

It seems to be the rage, so they keep me in a cage,

They go wild simply wild over me.


They go wild, simply wild over me,

I'm referring to the bed bug and the flea;

They disturb my slumber deep, and I murmur in my sleep,

They go wild, simply wild over me.


Will the roses grow wild over me

When I'm gone into the land that is to be?

When my soul and body part in the stillness of my heart,

Will the roses grow wild over me? [^]

[13] The 1935 Wagner Act granted workers the right to form a union and prohibited "unfair labor practices" by employers, while the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act "prohibited child labor, set a minimum wage, and wrote the forty hour workweek into law" (Freeman 376). Both of these acts, Ford and Sloan concluded in testimony before Congressional committees, violated the rights of management and thus did more harm than good. When the acts passed anyway, Ford and Sloan continued to ignore them on the grounds that like the NRA before them, the Wagner and Fair Labor Standard Acts would eventually be overturned by the Supreme Court since they "encroached on regulatory powers reserved to the states by the Tenth Amendment" or (as in an earlier case of a minimum wage law) were an "infringement on freedom of contract" (329). [^]

[14] "Civilization," Cameron at one point observes, in a stunning reversal of Hobbes and Locke, "progressed by gradually restricting the rights of government" (177). [^]

[15] In 1922, Ford wrote in his autobiography, "I have not been able to discover that repetitive labor injures a man in any way. I have been told by parlour experts that repetitive labor is soul - as well as body - destroying, but that has not been the result of our investigations. . . . The most thorough research has not brought out a single case of a man's mind being twisted or deadened by the work. The kind of mind that does not like competitive work does not have to stay in it. . . . If he stays in production, it is because he likes it" (qtd. in Thomas 399-400). [^]

[16] Irving Bernstein lists more fully their demands: jobs for the jobless, payment of 50 percent wages, the seven hour day, the end of the speed-up, rest periods, no discrimination against Negroes, free medical care at the Ford Hospital, free coal, liquidation of Harry Bennett's Service Department, company assumption of home mortgages and back taxes, and winter relief of $50 per family. [^]

[17] Different accounts give different numbers of the dead and wounded. Bernstein lists four dead and over fifty wounded. Downs five dead and fifty wounded. Disagreement also exists over the number of participants in both the Hunger March and the Funeral procession. Bernstein claims 3,000 and 40,000; Downs between 3,500 and 5,000 and 50,000. [^]

[18] This sentence of course echoes Walter Benjamin's seventh thesis on the philosophy of history, "There is no document of civilization, which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" (256). [^]

[19] Indeed, in The Cultural Front, Michael Denning documents what he calls "the laboring of culture" in the 1930s: "the increased influence on and participation of working-class Americans in the world of culture and the arts" as "children from working-class families grew up to become artists in the culture industries, and American workers became the primary audience for those industries" (xvii). [^]

[20] In this respect, these poems offer an implicit rebuke to the occasionally deterministic view of mass culture offered in the work of the Frankfurt School and Western Marxism more generally. Indeed, from this perspective "Ford Sunday Evening Hour" may be even more of an exemplary poem in that it shows how these union poets struggled against those tendencies in mass culture, seizing the opportunities created by its very popularity to address and persuade workers of their more class-conscious interests. [^]

 

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