Adapting the Immigrant to the Line: Americanization in the Ford Factory, 1914–1921

Cover: Ford Americanization School. Immigrant workers were taught consumerism, hostility to unionism, docility and servility within a class-based order in the name of lessons in English and Civics. Cf. The Domestic Peril: The Radical Alien and the Rise of Corporate Americanism, 1912-1919

Americanization involved the social and cultural assimilation of immigrants into the mainstream of American life. However, the process also constituted a unique and distinctly American, method for the resolution of a key industrial problem: the problem of work-discipline and of the adjustment of new workers to the factory environment. In the early twentieth century, the Ford Motor Company established an Americanization program in order to adapt immigrant workers to its new system of mass production.

Stephen Meyer, Journal of Social History, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Autumn, 1980), pp. 67-82 (16 pages)

Cf.