702 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Progressive Era
he introduced the Model T, a simple, light vehicle sturdy enough to navigate
the country’s poorly maintained roads. While early European models like the
Mercedes aimed at an elite market and were superior in craftsmanship, Ford
concentrated on standardizing output and lowering prices.
In 1913, Ford’s factory in Highland Park, Michigan, adopted the method of pro-
duction known as the moving assembly line, in which car frames were brought
to workers on a continuously moving conveyor belt. The process enabled Ford to
expand output by greatly reducing the time it took to produce each car. In 1914,
he raised wages at his factory to the unheard of level of five dollars per day (more
than double the pay of most industrial workers), enabling him to attract a steady
stream of skilled laborers. Labor conditions in the Ford plant were not as appealing
as the wages, however: assembly- line work was monotonous (the worker repeated
the same basic motions for the entire day), and Ford used spies and armed detec-
tives to prevent unionization. When other businessmen criticized him for endan-
gering profits by paying high wages, Ford replied that workers must be able to
afford the goods being turned out by American factories. Ford’s output rose from
34,000 cars, priced at $700 each, in 1910, to 730,000 Model T’s that sold at a price
of $316 (well within the reach of many workers) in 1916. The economic system
based on mass production and mass consumption came to be called Fordism.
The Promise of Abundance
As economic production shifted from capital goods (steel, railroad equipment,
etc.) to consumer products, the new advertising industry perfected ways of
increasing sales, often by linking goods with the idea of freedom. Numerous
products took “liberty” as a brand name or used an image of the Statue of Liberty
as a sales device. The department- store magnate Edward Filene called consum-
erism a “school of freedom,” since shoppers made individual choices on basic
questions of living. Economic abundance would eventually come to define the
“American way of life,” in which personal fulfillment was to be found through
acquiring material goods.
The promise of abundance shifted the quest for freedom to the realm of
private life, but it also inspired political activism. Exclusion from the world
of mass consumption would come to seem almost as great a denial of the
rights of citizenship as being barred from voting once had been. The desire for
consumer goods led many workers to join unions and fight for higher wages.
The argument that monopolistic corporations artificially raised prices at the
expense of consumers became a weapon against the trusts. “Consumers’ con-
sciousness,” wrote Walter Lippmann, who emerged in these years as one of the
nation’s most influential social commentators, was growing rapidly, with the
“high cost of living” as its rallying cry.