Made In America
The mind of Henry Ford, was, I think, not so much inventive as associative; his genius found full expression in the efficient rearrangement of things. He admired Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers, among others, because what they imagined and then brought to pass was genuinely new; Ford’s own achievements had more to do with what was readily available and could be improved. He did not conceive of the automobile; rather, he mass-produced it. And innovation followed in the wake of repetition. This seeming paradox—since, after all, few individuals have altered the future more thoroughly than did Henry Ford—informs the museum that bears his name. It is a forward-facing repository of the past preserved.
“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” as Edison observed; an idea may take shape in an instant, but its successful application must take time. And over time the shape and substance of that original idea will likely be refined until even its progenitor might be shocked. The single light bulb and the electrified city seem a world apart. Yet the principle of the assembly line has to do with just such juxtaposition: Put this next to that in rapid and uniform sequence, and something new will emerge. For example, 7,882 distinct tasks were required to assemble Ford’s 1923 Model T touring car, yet the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
Ford said, “In mass production there are no fitters.” By this he meant the parts were so precisely made that anyone with a little training could put them together at speed. The Model T and Model A, the roads and factories and steel mills and oil wells—our characteristic landscape, indeed, from urban sprawl to urban blight—all derive from and have depended on this method of assembly. What we take for granted nowadays is what the magnate dreamed then.
Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village form a sprawling complex in the town of Dearborn, Michigan. Halfway between Detroit Metropolitan Airport, to the southwest, and Detroit, twelve miles east, the ninety-three-acre site feels like a hybrid of factory and farm, a kind of cottage industry set in an industrial park. Or perhaps even an oasis; this is a world apart. In good weather (Greenfield Village shuts its buildings’ cold interiors from January to mid-March), a visitor can ride a train or horse-drawn carriage or paddlewheeler or carousel. There’s a passion for authenticity, but the principle of inclusion seems nonetheless eclectic. Unlike, say, Colonial Williamsburg or Sturbridge Village, these grounds stake no claim to geographical coherence or to a single time period. It’s as if an earlier Walt Disney, one committed to practical science, had set out to salvage buildings—especially buildings that once housed ideas.
Ford was devoted to Thomas Edison, and he reconstructed Edison’s “Invention Factory” from Menlo Park, along with the New Jersey clay on which it had stood. He brought the Wright brothers’ home and cycle shop north from Ohio. The Harvey Firestone farm has been restored, as have the Noah Webster home and Henry Ford’s birthplace and a Cotswold cottage and a Susquehanna plantation home—all authentic, board by brick.
The museum and the village attest to Ford’s omnivorous acquiring impulse. The collections now total more than a million artifacts and more than 25 million books, prints, manuscripts, and photographs. (The two institutions are separate but contiguous; there is no definite article in front of “Henry Ford” because it is not a museum about him, and the Ford Motor Company offers no continuing financial support.) Yet the industrialist did plan the whole to stand in close proximity to his company’s engineering laboratory and to Fair Lane, his Dearborn estate. The goal was to provide a working model for practical ingenuity, to celebrate old inventiveness and its sometimes surprising results. Ford himself embraced John Dewey’s principle of learning by doing; Greenfield Village was conceived of as an educational enterprise. “When we are through,” he said in 1925, “we shall have reproduced American life as lived.” The following year he asserted, “We want to have something of everything.” So boatloads and trainloads and planeloads and carloads disgorged themselves in Dearborn in order to preserve those very artifacts that he was helping render obsolete.
The most famous collection in the museum is, appropriately enough, a six-year-old permanent installation called “The Automobile in American Life.” What was once a vast warehouse of bumper-to-bumper machinery now serves as a selective account of our century’s landscape transformed. Alongside more than a hundred historically significant cars (the fifteen-millionth Model T, the limousine in which President Kennedy was riding when he was shot, the first Japanese car built in America), the museum also shows off a 1930s Texaco service station, a 1946 diner (complete with jukeboxes and napkin dispensers), a 1950s drive-in movie theater, and a room from a 1960s Holiday Inn. Plastic ants crawl across the bureau of a camper’s cabin; a suitcase lies open for packing on a rumpled bed.
The facade of the fourteen-acre museum building is a replica of Independence Hall. The treasures within include a copy of the Declaration of Independence, George Washington’s camp bed and campaign chest, and the rocker President Lincoln sat in on the night of his assassination, together with his shawl and hat. Henry Ford’s violins—among them an Amati, a Guarneri, and a pair of Stradivari—hang in a modest cabinet as if ready for tuning.
When Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh wanted a mobile studio, Ford lent them his own caravan; they returned it fifteen years later with a log of trips taken and a note of thanks. Visionary autos, specially designed or specially expensive, rub metallic shoulders with Studebakers and Nashes. Elsewhere there are streetcars, carriages, a Lunar Rover, Ford’s first automobile (the 1896 Quadricycle), airplanes, Conestoga wagons, fire-fighting apparatus, and a six-hundred-ton Allegheny locomotive.
For this visitor, however, it’s the easily overlooked objects that most reward attention. There are rug beaters, eggbeaters, vacuum cleaners, electric mixers, dishwashers; there are collections of clocks and gramophones; the farm machinery ranges from a sickle to a Massey-Harris combine; old music-making instruments are displayed alongside porcelain and glassware and ceramics and a furniture exhibit, spinning wheels and looms, clothes pounders and clothespins and mangles. The entire apparatus of our domestic history is in the great central hall.
Harold K. Skramstad, Jr., fifty-two, came to Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in 1981. Before that he worked at the Smithsonian Institution and as the director of the Chicago Historical Society. A lanky, exuberant man, Skram, as he is called, seems as much at ease in the cab of one of his locomotives or behind the wheel of a Model T as behind a desk. And his enthusiasm for the museum’s latest new permanent exhibit, “Made in America,” has proved contagious indeed.
The show is very much a collective achievement, with four primary writers, seven people principally involved, and hundreds who helped, all presided over by the museum’s director of programs, Steve Hamp. In contrast to the principles of mass production and managed assembly-line labor, where every decision was made at the top and handed down to workers, one has the sense that this procedure was bottom-ballasted—that those who produced the exhibition worked as a genuine team.
William S. Pretzer, the curator of “Made in America,” has been on the staff of Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village for eight years. Earlier he worked at the Smithsonian Institution and at the Winterthur Museum in WiImington, Delaware. “I went to graduate school,” he says, “so that I could do a project that would establish the relationship between people and things.” Two decades later he got to realize that particular ambition, and he is grateful for the chance. “History should make us nervous,” he declares, “but It should also give us the nerve to think creatively.”
For three years the team dreamed and planned and argued and arranged and rearranged and selected and bought objects and received donations and jockeyed for space. Bill Pretzer and his staff were still installing things on the day of the grand opening, and they are still tinkering with and fine-tuning their hydra-headed machine: they watch children point out recognizable plastic products or crank out power for light bulbs; they study audience reaction to the bulletin boards and displays. The firm of Albert Woods Design Associates, from New York, has been involved from the start; a 50,000-square-foot installation requires serious design. (Woods also helped create “The Automobile in American Life.”) There are more than 2,000 artifacts in “Made in America"—in addition to operating machines, hands-on activities, films, and videos—and they make a chock-a-block labyrinth, a kind of industrial maze.
The curators had to withdraw some of the permanent collection to make enough space for the show. But as John Bowditch, the curator of industry, likes to observe, “We don’t need all of the best; we only need the best.” One hundred and thirty steam engines and electrical generators were removed, though several of the massive engines were left in place because they would have cost too much to disassemble. They guard the rear of the great entrance hall, iron mastodons caught in the glacial onrush of the industrial age. Or, to shift the metaphor, these windmills and pumps and turbines and ship’s engines construct a kind of temple for the visitor to wander through. As Matthew Boulton, a British manufacturer, observed in 1776, “I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have—Power.”
Yet the inchoate-seeming installation itself is in fact remarkably a mirror of the making of our nation. “Made in America” is part and parcel now of what has become, with more than 1.1 million visitors last year, the most visited indoor-outdoor museum complex in North America. Skramstad wrote recently in Museum News : “The word ‘museum’ has lost its power… . To define a major, research-driven natural history museum, a regional science and technology center, an encyclopedic art museum, or a local volunteerrun historical society as a ‘museum’ is like describing General Motors, K mart, a regional bank, or a local convenience store as a ‘business'—accurate, but not helpful.” What Skramstad has helped shape and define is an installation that may require a new word—or several thousand of them —to describe.
The first section, “Making Things,” is broken down into “Modern Manufacturing, 1960-1990,” “Managing Industry, 1880-1992,” “Mass Production, 1900-1945,” “Workers’ Stories, 1880-1920,” “New Goods, New Values, 1850-1900,” “A Most Mechanical Age, 1820-1880,” and “The Craft Era, 1750-1850.” After this retrospective segment cornes a central treatment titled “Making Choices.” Then the third and last area covers “Making Power.” This consists of “The Electrical Age, 1880-1990,” “The Heyday of Steam Power, 1870-1910,” “Alternatives to Steam, 1870-1885,” “Water & Wind Power, 1800-1910,” “Steam Powers American Industry, 1840-1880,” and “The British Industrial Revolution, 1700-1850.” The visitor starts at the contemporary moment and advances backward, as it were, through time.
Entering, one comes first upon the earliest commercial robot, called the Unimate Robot, which was put into service in 1961, in a General Motors factory in Trenton, New Jersey. It removed parts from a die-casting machine and placed them in a cooling bath; this was typical of early robots, which replaced workers in very repetitive and dangerous jobs. Here too is a “training” robot with which visitors can occupy themselves—instructing it to perform tasks and applauding its silent compliance. At entrance left is a mockup of a “clean room,” viewed through an actual clean-room air shower and projecting a life-size video of people at work with microscopes. They are making microchips, which, as a hands-on demonstration amply shows, are indecipherable to the naked eye. At entrance right a large Fanuc Robotics six-axis articulated painting robot with spraying arm repeats its tireless intricate dance.
My previous hands-on experience of robotics was limited to a toy in the house of wealthy friends. They owned a kind of silent butler that would respond to instructions and deliver Coca-Colas or peanuts or dry martinis to guests. Two and a half feet high, it racketed across the room, balancing provisions on a tray. My wife and I were fearful it would spill or crash into things, and we poured the drinks and sliced the cheese ourselves; our daughters, however, were wholly at ease with the creature they called Dynamite and programmed it to perform its tasks relentlessly.
So too with the display “Modern Manufacturing"; it feels both familiar and strange. From an overhead conveyor system—technically a Unibilt inverted monorail conveyor- hang mass-produced objects in a kind of mechanical conga line; they circle and glide. A woven rug, a stove top, a tire, a shopping basket, a toilet, a car seat, a door panel, a bathtub, rubber wading boots, a hot-water heater, a wooden chair, an airplane-chair frame, a manhole cover, a television cabinet skein past; at given intervals the robot arm turns up, as if to spray-paint a car door or minivan fender or wheelbarrow bed as it passes. There are skylights and washing-machine components, a toy wagon, a bicycle frame, a kitchen sink and chemical-shipping drum and car supercharger and floor pan; they perform—if not a conga or the bunny hop—a silent pavane overhead.
Bill Pretzer asked himself and his design team, “What are the ways that the visitor is going to move and learn; how do we engage the senses fully here?” They concluded that “what you have to do is choreograph the experience.” The experience is now nearly total: sound, sight, and touch (though neither taste nor smell) are turn by turn engaged. Unlike those special exhibits that emphasize, say, “Portraits by Impressionists” or “A Voyage to the Moon” or “Treasures of the Incas,” “Made in America” feels integral to and seamlessly integrated within the museum itself.
Some examples: An automatic assembly system illustrates the precision of contemporary manufacturing technology, operating as if it were putting together 1,500 electrical switches per hour. Alongside a massive glassblowing machine, 600 light bulbs represent one minute’s worth of its production. Fiber-optic cable aglow with simulated current links three 27-foot electrical transmission towers modeled on those that transmit power produced at Niagara Falls.
Henry Ford denned mass production as “applying the principles of power, accuracy, continuity and speed to a manufacturing project.” There’s a video clip of his Highland Park factory, composed of motion-picture footage taken in 1921 and 1922. Eerily, considering the clatter and clank of the original, there is no sound. But a nine-minute video entitled Workers’Stories, 1880-1920 provides moving testimony to the hardship it entailed to brave this brave new world. Drawing on letters, diaries, and oral testimony, the video illustrates migrants’ and immigrants’ attitudes toward conditions and opportunities in the cities of a burgeoning America.
A touch-screen computer lets the visitor feel what it’s like to run an electric-power plant singlehandedly. A clip from “I Love Lucy” shows Lucy and Ethel trying to keep up with a conveyor belt in a candy factory; a display case contains work by the poet Philip Levine and the rock star Bruce Springsteen about work; the Corning Glass ribbon machine, from 1928, which could assemble 600 to 700 glass casings per minute, is shown alongside a taped account of its use by one of its former operators, Robert Maynard.
Henry Ford’s office—that place from which his instructions used to emanate—has been reconstructed complete with desk and safe and blueprints and a portrait of Edison on the far wall. There’s the world’s first commercial stereo lithography machine, 1897; there’s a 1912 Ingersoll milling machine for Model T engine blocks; there are miniature versions of the trend-setting modular furniture of Herman Miller, Inc., from the 1930s. There are photographs showing interior views of General Electric’s Schenectady works and the products that were made there in 1903. There’s an 1875 marine steam engine standing icon-like, totemic in the center of the hall, and a mammoth 1891 direct-current triple-expansion engine-driven generator that was part of New York City’s original power system. There’s the holiest of holies, the world’s oldest existing steam engine (deployed for pumping water out of deep wells) of the Newcomen type, designed around 1710 and built in the 1750s.
An entire shoe shop and cooper’s shop have been transported from Greenfield Village—small buildings now within the vast museum building—with hands-on activities inside. There’s a “Tower of Power,” in which the visitor is invited to power a series of forty-watt bulbs by turning a hand crank. There are cartoons instructing us on how all this works and what it all means.
There’s a full hydroelectric turbine generator from a power plant in Spokane, Washington, that has been functional since 1903. The Washington Water Power Company once supplied power via this machine to silver mines hundreds of miles away in Idaho. When the museum staff assembled it for “Made in America,” they took a blowtorch to the casing, so that we can step inside to see the workings.
The twenty-twenty accuracy of hindsight has been juxtaposed to foresight in terms of the power sources of 1890: Which would you bet on, and why? There’s a kerosene engine, a Brayton hot-air engine, a Backus water motor, an Otto four-stroke internal-combustion engine, and an electric generator; only the last two have survived to matter greatly in our present economy. A Tennessee farmer is quoted as saying, around 1940 and after the completion of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s electrification program: “The greatest thing in the world is to have the love of God in your heart. The next greatest thing to have is electricity in your house.”
Yet all is not always for the best in this industrial world, of course. William Blake’s fierce query “And was Jerusalem builded here/Among those dark Satanic mills?” retains its special force in the exhibition’s context. There are videos that demonstrate the inhumane side of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theory of efficiency and the stress it could inflict. Photos by Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, and others record the strain in factory workers’ faces. “Made in America” is by no means an extended panegyric to the virtues of manufacture; it’s a warts-andall representation of what industry achieves and costs. The hortatory advertisements and self-congratulatory television commercials of the 1950s it includes look simply silly today. We have acquired, I think, a pervasive unease in America about what we’ve made and failed to make, and that is acknowledged here too.
The part of the installation titled “Making Power,” about the energy industry, does feel elegiac, as though one were confronting the metallic equivalent of the slabs of Stonehenge or the statues of Easter Island. It conveys a feeling, probably unintentional, of how the mighty are fallen- since the scale of the older machines was so much larger. And then there’s the issue of how to deal with the phrase Made in America itself, and the xenophobic slogan “Buy American” with which it is at least in part associated. Such artifacts as Wedgwood china quietly remind us that our nation has always been only a part of a global economy.
So Henry Ford’s original boosterish intention has been altered considerably to incorporate a sense of “What have we wrought?” The cost of energy can no longer—if it ever could—be counted as a simple monthly bill. Waste has become an inseparable part of the process of mass production, and you have to plan for obsolescence in order to sell the same product again. But how do you design such a failure as the Edsel or New Coke? If you’ve got brilliant people interacting brilliantly, why do things go so wrong? This exhibition fails to answer such questions, of course, but it doesn’t fail to ask them; it’s a long way from the paeans to progress at EPCOT Center or the forced cartoonish optimism of Disney World.
Museum , in its root meaning, signifies “place of the muses,” a place consecrated to what individuals or groups have shaped and accomplished before. But most of us encounter a paradox when we enter such an institution: The silence and reverence we first envisioned gives way to hurly-burly, a crush of spectators, and a cornucopia of objects. Henry Ford Museum is so open and so vast a space that there’s always room to roam and air to breathe. Yet in terms of both the collection and its visitors, those who manage it must deal with crowd control.
Harold Skramstad recently wrote: “In the past, museum leadership has been academically trained, inwardly driven, and apolitical. In the world of tomorrow, museum leadership will be more diverse in style, more outwardly directed into the community, and more political in recognizing and building strategic alliances with other organizations. At the same time, museum leaders cannot be absolved of their obligation to recognize and encourage critical thinking, rigorous scholarship, and teamwork within their individual museums. All in all, a tough set of specifications.”
For this visitor, those specifications have been met; the museum is more outwardly directed than ever, yet maintains ever more rigorous scholarship and teamwork. I’ve been to “Made in America” three times now, and in three separate guises. First, on the glittering night that it opened, when my attention was principally engaged by friends in evening clothes, jazz bands, speech making, champagne, and shrimp. Second, for a kind of tutorial walk-through under the expert tutelage of Bill Pretzer and Mary Lynn Heininger of the museum staff. Then, last, as a wholly private citizen, watching children, following tour groups, dreaming, and rambling, adrift. Each trip provided pleasure and instruction, and each was but a surface scratch; this museum and this exhibit have real depth and range.
