How Fordism and Fascism Gave Birth to Modern Car Culture

In 1913, Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line at his factories, a system where workers performed repetitive tasks while parts moved past them on conveyor belts. This innovation, inspired by slaughterhouses where animal carcasses moved between workers, drastically increased productivity and disciplined laborers by reducing their movements to simple, standardized actions. Ford also pioneered vertical integration, controlling every stage of production from raw materials like rubber to distribution, which lowered costs and allowed him to pay workers higher wages. Before the five-dollar day introduced in 1914, Ford’s turnover rate was so high that the company had to hire nearly 1,000 workers annually to retain just 100. This wage, described as a family wage, became the foundation of the male-breadwinner model, where men earned enough to support a family, reinforcing traditional gender roles and working-class respectability.

Ford did not just manage production; he also sought to control workers’ private lives through his company’s Sociological Department, which monitored employees’ diets, alcohol consumption, and living conditions. This surveillance system aimed to create not just disciplined workers but moral industrial citizens, rewarding temperance, thrift, and domesticity. Ford’s inspectors visited workers’ homes to ensure compliance, though this system was eventually abandoned due to high costs. His approach aligned with scientific management, a method developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor that sought to eliminate inefficiencies by breaking work into repetitive, easily learned tasks. Taylor famously described the ideal worker as a trained gorilla, emphasizing the removal of human creativity from labor. Ford’s factories employed workers speaking up to 50 different languages, reflecting the diverse migrant workforce drawn to Detroit from the American South, Europe, and the Middle East.

Ford’s industrial system extended beyond the factory into an industrial moral economy, where workers who earned their bread through labor were praised, while those who profited from speculation or finance were condemned. This ideology, called producerism, distinguished between virtuous producers and parasitic takers, echoing late 19th-century Midwestern populism. Ford’s rhetoric opposed finance capital, and his anti-Semitism was inseparable from this stance. He distributed anti-Semitic texts like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and The International Jew through his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which was circulated in Ford dealerships and placed in new cars’ glove boxes. His disdain for banks and outside investors led him to finance projects internally, avoiding dependence on external capital. This moral economy framed workers as contributors to national wealth, while financiers were seen as siphoning resources without producing anything tangible.

Fordism’s principles spread internationally in the 1930s, attracting admirers in Italy, Germany, Russia, and Japan, all seeking to escape the influence of British and American financiers. Specialists from these countries visited Ford’s River Rouge plant in Detroit to study mass production techniques. Adolf Hitler, who hung Ford’s portrait in his office, praised Ford in Mein Kampf and awarded him the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938. Nazi officials, including Baldur von Schirach, cited Ford’s The International Jew as a source of their bigotry. Both Hitler and Mussolini planned mass auto production projects, such as Volkswagen’s Kraft durch Freude Wagen (later renamed Volkswagen) and Fiat’s Mirafiori plant. Hitler envisioned a people’s car priced under 1,000 reichsmarks, but wartime shortages and forced labor meant no civilian cars were produced. Despite this failure, Germany and Italy expanded their highway networks, the Autobahn and autostrada, laying the groundwork for modern car culture.

World War II accelerated the global spread of Fordist principles. In the United States, car manufacturers like Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler shifted from producing cars to military equipment, earning Detroit the nickname Arsenal of Democracy. These companies manufactured tanks, airplanes, jeeps, and billions of bullets, temporarily suspending their automotive production. In Nazi Germany, Volkswagen’s factory in Wolfsburg, built partly with confiscated trade union funds, transitioned to military production. The war also expanded industrial infrastructure, including pipelines and refineries, which later supported civilian oil consumption. The U.S. Geological Survey warned of an impending gasoline famine due to the automobile’s high demand, prompting the government to support domestic oil companies’ overseas exploration, leading to American oil companies’ pivot to the Middle East in the 1930s.

After World War II, business analyst Peter Drucker described the auto industry as the industry of industries, a prototype for modern industrial economies. The car became central to economic organization, dictating the tempo for associated industries like steel, oil, glass, rubber, and construction. This system, called automobility, deepened the metabolic rift—a term describing humanity’s rupture with natural conditions—by accelerating the exploitation of resources and waste production. The automotive industry’s network includes credit providers, insurance companies, repair shops, petrol stations, highways, and retail parks, all contributing to capital accumulation. The car’s reliance on fossil fuels tied its growth to the oil industry, which expanded globally to meet demand. By the eve of World War II, the U.S. accounted for four-fifths of the world’s car fleet, consuming more oil per vehicle than other regions, while Europeans used smaller, more efficient cars due to limited oil supplies and fragmented markets.