Fordlandia (37 page)

Rivera, who never learned to drive, spent a month inside the River Rouge, visiting every one of its plants and sketching its operations. In his autobiography, Rivera tells of losing himself for whole days and nights in the Rouge’s more than ninety buildings, observing the movement of its seventy thousand workers, “making literally thousands of sketches of towering blast furnaces, serpentine conveyor belts, impressive scientific laboratories, busy assembling rooms, also of precision instruments, some of them massive yet delicate, and of the men who worked them all.” What others thought a deafening roar—like the British journalist Julian Street, who likened the sound of Rouge’s predecessor Highland Park factory to Niagara Falls—Rivera heard as a “new music,” a “wonderful symphony.” His time in the labyrinth awakened his childhood “passion for mechanical toys,” which had matured into an appreciation of the machine, “for its meaning to man—his self-fulfillment and liberation from drudgery and poverty.” It was a sentiment Ford—who titled a chapter in one of his coauthored books “Machinery, the New Messiah”—surely would have recognized, for he similarly and repeatedly insisted that mechanization meant emancipation from material drudgery, more time to enjoy the finer things of life. “For most purposes a man with a machine is better than a man without a machine,” he said. “Unless we better understand the mechanical portion of life, we cannot have the time to enjoy the trees, and the birds, and the flowers, and the green fields.”
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After one month in the Rouge, Rivera spent another eight painting his masterwork. He saw his commission, financed mostly by Edsel Ford, as an opportunity to take the machine as an object of modern art, not in the gauzy, distant way that impressionists depicted trains running through a green valley or steam rising from a factory mill. Rather, he wanted, in his words, to bring the Rouge’s “noise, smoke, and dust” directly into the institute’s “charming sanctum,” to unsettle the city swells. When he had finished, the museum’s patrons did complain of the rudeness of his work. Asked why he hadn’t chosen a more “traditional” subject, a still life, say, or a landscape, Rivera said that he “found any factory more significant and beautiful than any of the subjects they suggested.” Collectively known as
Detroit Industry
, Rivera’s murals are perhaps the most faithful tribute ever composed not just to the Rouge’s power but to the holism of Henry Ford’s thinking, even though Ford makes only a cameo appearance, in a small panel where he is teaching a trade school engine class.
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The murals comprise two major panels, along with a series of minor ones, mixing techniques drawn from cubism and futurism, social realism, classical and Renaissance art, and traditional Aztec, Mayan, and Olmec motifs to depict over fifty major Rouge operations. The courtyard’s north wall features towering spindles, casting boxes, sand blasters, rolling mills, and all of the ovens and machines needed to make the recently inaugurated V8 engine and transmission. In the background looms a volcano-like blast furnace, illuminated by flares of yellow, red, and orange. Rivera called the making of steel a thing of “plastic beauty,” as “beautiful as the early Aztec or Mayan sculptures.” The south wall mural, which depicts the finishing work of making a car, the stamping, pressing, welding, painting, and testing, is more restrained in terms of color and technique. Elsewhere in the courtyard, Rivera portrays other elements of the Rouge, its aviation and boat production, railroads, and powerhouses.

Unlike the haunting, unpeopled work of Charles Sheeler, who around the same time was capturing the Rouge in a series of widely publicized photographs and paintings, Rivera’s frescoes are jammed with overall-clad workers—painters, welders, forgers, female spark plug testers, and even accountants—all the human energy that went into building a car. Productive motion is conveyed by contraposition. On the north wall, men, particularly those in the foreground, all seem to be bending backward, their muscular bodies pulling one thing or another. On the south, they lean forward, into their work. “I thought of the millions of different men by whose combined labor and thought automobiles were produced,” Rivera said in his autobiography, “from the miners who dug the iron ore out of the earth to the railroad men and teamsters who brought the finished machines to the consumer,” conquering “space and time” and winning “ever-expanding victories . . . against death.”

Rivera, the Marxist, painted a few notes of dissent, including a small panel depicting workers leaving the factory over the pedestrian overpass where Bennett’s men had gunned down the hunger marchers. While everywhere else in the murals humans run into one another, with no clear line fully separating one person from the next, suggesting connectivity and solidarity, here the solemn processional figures are distinct, implying that the alienation other critics of capitalism attributed to assembly production begins, for Rivera, at the factory’s exit. The general mood of the frescoes celebrates determination, portraying workers energized by strenuous activity rather than enervated by machines. Rivera himself took great pride when an engineer representing a group of Chrysler workers praised him for capturing the essence of the production process, fusing “together, in a few feet, sequences of operations which are actually performed in a distance of at least two miles, and every inch of his work is technically correct.” The only thing missing, another group of workers told Rivera, was the factory whistle.

From Charles Sheeler’s 1927 series of River Rouge photographs. “The silence is awesome,” wrote historian Leo Marx of another of Sheeler’s works. “By superimposing order, peace, and harmony upon our modern chaos, Sheeler represents the anomalous blend of illusion and reality in the American consciousness.”

How Rivera managed this compression is the point where his frescoes move from merely representing the Rouge to embodying the idea behind it. Fordism is defined as an industrial process that breaks down the human movement that goes into making a product—in Ford’s case a car—into its simplest component and then uses assembly lines to choreograph that movement to achieve maximum efficiency. It is a process that is impossible to observe sequentially over time, that is, by following the steps needed to transform raw material into finished product, since Fordism in its totality combines multiple subassembly processes that take place simultaneously—like a “river and its tributaries”—before converging in a main trunk line. Rivera achieved this effect by applying the medieval technique of polyscenic narrative, in which multiple scenes are placed together in a unified space. Such polyscenic narration usually tells a story over time, with the same characters appearing in different scenes that take place chronologically, that is, one after the other. The Detroit murals, however, illustrate specific tasks taking place in different places during a single moment, compressing into an integrated visual image the Rouge’s intense interconnectivity and unrelenting flow. While medieval painters separated scenes with columns, archways, and windows, Rivera made use of Albert Kahn’s snakelike conveyor belts and steel girders to move viewers from one discrete job to another, from foregrounded die and press workers to the foundry men deep in the painting’s recesses, the whole thing backlighted orange by the forge fire.
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If Rivera’s two principal panels sought to freeze in a single instance the multiple, simultaneous motions needed to produce a car (a defining feature of modernism is its reduction of experience to an explosive “now”), he also, in a series of surrounding paintings, revealed an appreciation of the millennia it took to produce both the raw materials and the human labor needed to make a Ford car. Above each of the two main frescoes are narrow oblong frames depicting geological sedimentation, layers of rock, fossil, crystals, limestone, crustaceans, and sand—in other words, the prehistory of much of the raw materials that fed the Rouge’s forges, ovens, and furnaces (as well as the frescoes themselves, as tons of sand and limestone were needed to mix plaster and pigments). Elsewhere, Rivera included what could be a scene from an Upper Peninsula forest and a rubber tree being harvested by what appears to be Brazilian tappers (though no Fordlandia latex had yet made it to the Rouge). And at the top of the walls, above the oblong geological panels, Rivera painted four nude females, allegorical representations of the world’s great races, which produced the workers needed to extract the resources from the earth. In both style and sentiment, these allegories connect Rivera’s Detroit frescoes to his Mexican murals, which often contained idealized, romantic portrayals of the glories of Aztecs or Olmecs, progenitors, in Rivera’s epic visual history, of Mexico’s revolutionary nationalism.

Auto workers thought the only thing missing from Diego Rivera’s Detroit murals was the factory whistle
.

Neither Rivera nor Ford saw a contradiction in celebrating the power of machinery and science while at the same time idealizing a lost past. Ford shared Rivera’s sense that his factory resulted from the collision of multiple time frames: industrial, geological, mytho-historical. Influenced by the eclectic spiritualism of his time, as well by his favorite author, Ralph Waldo Emerson, he repeatedly voiced beliefs that resonated with Rivera’s upper panels—in reincarnation, in the existence of an “over-soul” composed of the accumulated experience of past lives, in the idea that “memory never dies.” “We remember things from past lives in our present life,” and not just individually but collectively, Ford said. He believed that the earth had nourished and lost many civilizations over millions of years—like Rivera’s Aztecs and Olmecs—and that the knowledge produced by these civilizations had, in some mystical way, been handed down, culminating in the advancements of modern industry. “What survived is wisdom—the essence of experience.”
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RIVERA LOST HIMSELF not just in the River Rouge in preparation for his Detroit murals but also in Greenfield Village, Ford’s elaborate homage to rural America. By the time the Mexican painter arrived in the Motor City, Ford had added antique collecting to his many other late-in-life passions. He had begun acquiring historical curios since at least 1906, when he started buying pieces of Edisoniana, anything to do with the life and work of his mentor and friend Thomas Edison, as well as copies of his beloved childhood school textbook, William Holmes McGuffey’s
Eclectic Reader
. But collecting became a much more intense occupation following his humiliating 1919 trial, which was convened to settle a suit he filed against the
Chicago Tribune
for calling him an “anarchist.” Ford’s lengthy testimony became the talk of the country, as newspapers reported on his apparent illiteracy and his ignorance of historical events such as the American Revolution and the War of 1898. Asked to say who Benedict Arnold was, Ford replied: “He’s a writer, I think,” prompting hoots of laughter from the courthouse audience. It was around this time that he first proclaimed that “history is bunk,” an opinion he would repeat throughout the 1930s and 1940s. “I say history is bunk—bunk—double bunk,” he said in 1940. “Why, it isn’t even true.”

Ford was condemning not so much all references to the past as a particular interpretation of history, one that emphasized great men and their deeds. As historian Steven Watts has noted, Ford saw history in “surprisingly modern terms,” not as an “empirical recovery of absolute truth but as
interpretations
of the past.” If history was being “rewritten every year from a new point of view,” how then, he asked, could “anybody claim to know the truth about history?” Ford’s answer was to reject “great-man” history in favor of an account rooted in the slow evolutionary changes that occur in the “everyday life and work of ordinary people.” He might not have been able to say what the War of 1898 was, but Ford was sure that stories of the kind that hailed the heroics of Theodore Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill, even if they were true—which he doubted they were—had little to do with what drove progress. “The real history of a people was not expressed in wars,” he said, “but in the way they lived and worked. . . . The history of America wasn’t written in Washington, it was written in the grass roots.” And any history book that celebrated “guns and speeches” but ignored the “harrows and all the rest of daily life is bunk,” Ford insisted.
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