Sic Peter Hallis Professor of Planning atthe Bartlett School of Architecture and Planaing, University College London. He is the author or editor of over thiry books, including The World Cities (1966, 197, 1983) and Cities ‘Tomorrow (1988). He has received the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geo- graphical Society for distncrion in research, and is a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the Academia Europea. CITIES +IN + CIVILIZATION Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order Peter Hall[A PHOENIX GIANT PAPERBACK First published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1998 ‘This paperback edition published in 1999 by Phoenix an imprint of Orion Books Led, Orion House, § Upper Saine Martins Lane London, WC2H 9EA Copyright © 1998 Peter Hall ‘he right of Peter Hall to be identified as the author ofthis work has been asserted by him in accordance withthe ‘Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, Ail rights reserved. No part of this publication may be seprduce, sored ina seteval stn ot ransmited in any fori or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission ofthe copyright owner A CiP catalogue record for this book ie available from the British Library. ISBN 0 75380 815 3 Printed and bound in Great Britain by ‘Clays Led, Se Ives ple CONTENTS Acknowledgements List of llustrations BOOK ONE: The City as Cultural Crucible 1 Great Cities in their Golden Ages 2. The Fountainhead ‘Athens 500-400 nc 2 The Rediscovery of Life Florence 1400-1500 4. The World as Stage London 1570-1620 The City as Pleasure Principle Vienna 1780-1910 6 The Capital of Light Paris 1870-1910 7 The Invention of the Twentiech Century Berlin 1918-1933, 8 The Key to Creativity BOOK TWO: The City as Innovative Milew 9 The Innovative Milieu 10 The Fisst Industrial City Manchester 1760-1830 IM. The Conquest of the Oceans Glasgow 1770-1890 12. The Pioneer Technopolis Berlin 1840-1930 13. The Mass Production of Mobility Detroit 1890-1915 14 ‘The Industrialization of Information San Francisco/Palo Alko/Berkeley 1950-1990 ° 14 159 201 239 279 291 310 348 a7 396 23CONTENTS 15. The State as Permanent Innovator Tokyo-Kanagawa 1890-1990 16 The Innovative Essence BOOK THREE: The Marriage of Art and ‘Techoology 17 The Invention of Mass Culture 18 The Dream Factory Los Angeles 1910-1945 19 The Soul of the Delea Memphis 1948-1956 20. The Secret of the Marriage BOOK FOUR: The Establishment of the Urban Order 21 The Challenge to the Urban Order 22. The Imperial Capital Rome 50 nc-a 100 23. The Utlitarian City London 1825-1900 24 The City of Perpetual Public Works Paris 1850-1870, ‘The Apothcosis of che Modern New York 1880-1940 26 The City as Freeway Los Angeles 1900-1980 W The Social Democratic Utopia Stockholm 1945-1980 28 ‘The City of Capitalism Rampant London 1979-1993 29° The Achievement of the Urban Order B BOOK FIVE: The Union of Art, Technology, and Organization 30 The City of the Coming Golden Age Notes Bibliography Index 455 483 520 553 603 an on a 803 942 888 932 943 1051 13s ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1 owe debts of acknowledgement and gratitude to the following people and institutions: First, and overwhelmingly, to George Weidenfeld, who first suggested the idea of this book nearly twenty years ago, and who pursued it zealously but nearly unsuccessfully. am delighted that, after some vicissitudes, it has returned to the care of his house. ‘Second, to my agent, Michael Sissons, who took up che job of persuasion over the best part of a decade, and will, I hope, be satisfied with the result. ‘Third, to the staff of ewo great libraries: the (old) British Library and the Library of the University of California at Berkeley, where most of the research, for this book was undertaken, Without their dedicated help, this book ~ like 40 many others ~ would never have come to existence. Fourth, to Paschal Preston, co-author of The Carrier Wave, and to Routledge, the book's publisher, to reproduce material from it in Chapter 12; and to my assistants on parts of the research, Joanne Parker and Hiro Izushi in Berkeley: to Hiro for his work on Japanese sources for Chapter 18, without which the ‘chapter would never have been written at al; and to Joanne for her bibliographic work on Chapter 26, Fifth, to the Britsh Academy and the Sveriges Akademi, for a British ‘Academy fellowship with Swedish support to conduct research for Chapter 27 in Stockholm. And, during that visit in October 1995, ro Thomas Hall for his derailed comments and assistance on Chapter 27; and to Martin Rorby for bibliographic assistance with the Stockholm plans. Sixth, to John Goddard, for his invaluable bibliographic assistance with ‘Chapter 30; and to the opportunity to participate with him at a session in the British Association for the Advancement of Science conference at the Univer ‘of Neweastle-upon-Tyne in September 1995, which helped shape up my ideas ‘on the chapter, Seventh, to Arabella Quinn, for her close reading and derailed editorial ‘comments on the first draft of the manuscript, which pointed the way to making i a much tauter and more readable product; to Ravindra Mirchandani, who did an equally expert job on the final draft of Book One; to Rebecea Wilson, ‘my publisher at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and to Elaine Wills, who found the picrares; not Jeast, to Celia Levest for her impeccably close attention to the final copy-editing of the manuscript. Eighth, to a group of good academic friends, with whom I have worked onat ‘THE CITY AS CULTURAL CRUCIBLE thio etre ade . Farrer chon 1, centr: hierarchical age and a les d inion Tat oe ion war ary rey s ys in every capitalist capital city, in the second oe sew oy and Si tare fh we We : artistic creativity in many of those 2 for mus henna, Sehr Loni fa ana olin nfs wee ea = road no overwhelmingly, the European visual arts le Ss iS 010 is an example of a traditional indus i ain fee 4; transforming itself so radically, with the h ane = ‘over France and then all over Europe, that in the eee ae niet 1 acute of boa produced. ° ig = Str ad mans Marc es of ons wich why Ps shone Marne Sst le dhe Ma oe a ‘esting ue uma dee of eiberte knowing oer ane val a deep ~ perhaps even unconscious ~ desis oder es: he inant rc oe The no ck i IG i amr sw ake a cure, ems that obsessed them. i leat Poi goup of peopl gern sony, ba ae pee ee Spel poof aon em te ont ceca dieioaliy on a fat pee of eamas. We ight chooee te eeatsclem cy, 0 fd in Obmps& dibeateseenpen aoe ie en face up tele own hypoct s Bergres m hyposy and sens rin Le Baraat Profound comment on the isolation of crowds; but that is raat way the painters painted them, Critics, of essa . Critics, of whatever persuasion, {emped fo sea all manne of meanings into art the ais ‘wn artistic revolusion, always knew better, hhave always been themselves, as they 7 The Invention of the Twentieth Century BERLIN 1918-1933 Sudden, tke locus of artistic innovation in Europe shifted dramavically: the epicentee of the modern movement in the arcs selocated from Paris and Vienna, where it had made its home at the turn of che century, to two other ties, Moscow and Berlin, In the 1920s the Americans might flood into Par ‘eawn by the reputation of Picasso and the legends which Gertrude Stein he Spun around him; but che spint of the place had gone. As John Wille the treat historian of the culcure of Weimar Germany, has recorded: I he historical cataclysm that marked che end of World War 1, all of a France remained the home of che great individual innovators. But in che new ‘stage of development ~ social, collective, technological and ultimately political — such figures had less t0 say. For anybody who wants to follow the movement beyond ehis turning-point the achievements of the Weimar Republic are crucial Je was an extraordinary period of history, a mere fifteen years, between the fall of the Hobenzolleen monarchy and the abortive cevolution of 1919, and the final eiumph of Adolf Hitler. And, chowgh other great German cites played their role, overwhelmingly che history of the Weimar years is the history off Berlin, The conductor Bruno Walter described che accomplishments of the Berlin theates in those years: they “could hardly be surpassed in talent, vitality, Toftiness of tention, and varity’: ‘Deutsches Theatre and Kammerspile, in which Reinkardt held sway’, the Tribone under Eugen Robert, and the State “Theatre under Leopold Jessner, or the Volksbuhne under Karlheinz Marin; the newspapers devoted considerable space to arin spite ofthe politcal excitement. ‘Masie was as lively: the Philharmonic under Furewangler, the Bruno Waker concerts wih the Philharmonic Orchestra, che State Opera with premieres ike Berg's Wosseck or Jandtek’s Jenifa, the Municipal Opera under Walter or the Kroll under Klemperer. And even Walter's list is incomplete: there were the political cabaret, politcal journalism, Piseator's experiments in political theatre, Doblin's Bein Alexanderplate, premires of fms and Brecht and Wells Die Dreigroschenoper, the publishing houses of Mosse and. Ullsrein; che great publishing souse of Fischer, which had on its list Thomas Mann, Hermann less, Gerkart Hauptmann, Stefan Zweig, Carl Zuckmayer, Alfred Doblin and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.> Tn the Weimar Republic's closing months, André Gide pointed to architeerure240 ‘THE CITY AS CULTURAL CRUCIBLE sand the theatre as evidence that ‘Germany ie thirty yeast ahead af France’. But it was more than architecture. Willett, again: the unigue fate of the pti was not so much the new buildings (hich afer all bout only abut stent of he population even ia Panera he Comency of atide and vsion which underlay so many oft diferet spec Mat Sho od Kt Wels ms il nel ag together, and his wa east they reed theme armpions an opment tovnew cechnolgis and medi, an economy of resureey sete th at Sh fe con and» lice o wrk oly fr # sce Berlin’s absolute dominance in Germany, and effectively in Europe, was the ‘more astonishing, because so much was also happening in the provincial cities In architecture, there were the Dessau Bauhaus, the great housing developments of Frankfurt and che Seutgart Weissenhofriedlung; thus, despite Berlin's Avus motorway and Tempelhof Airport by the late 1920s Frankfurt was competing, for the tile of the first twentieth-century city. Wellestablished provincial art schools like Dresden and Karlsruhe generated their own Dada and Verist movements, independent of the capital; there were major theatre performances in Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Leipzig and Dresden, Throughout Gecmany, there was’ a sense of almost missionary zeal for the impersonal ucilizarian design that the German designers shared with the Russian Con- structivists; and, after 1925, this new machine aesthetic spread s0 rapidly chat it was found in mundane applications like the compact kitchen with sink unit, the folding bed, nesting chairs and stools, double-decker beds for children, unit furniture and built-in cupboards. But Berlin was the magnet for creative talent, as symbolized by Bertole Brecht’s decision, in 1924 ~ the year Mann’s Der Zauberberg, appeared - to move from Munich to Berlin, As Peter Gay has pointed out, Brecht’s move was significant because it symbolized ‘the growing ower of Berlin in the golden mid-«wentis": ‘As Germany's largest city, as the capital of Prussia and the Empire, Berlin had been the only possible choice for capital of the Republic. And Berlin came to engross not mezely government offices and parey headquarters, but the leaders of cultute, atthe expense of the provinces. Other major cities like Munich, Frankfurt, or Hamburg struggled to keep excellence in their universtics, rook pride in special insticues, cultivated continued high quality in their theaters and liveliness in their Bohemian quarters. But Berlin was a magnet ,.. To go to Berlin was the aspiration ofthe composer, the journalist, the actor, with its superb orchestras, is hundred and twenty newspaper, is forty theaters, Belin was the place for the ambitious, the energetic, the talented. Wherever they started, it was in Berlin chat they became, and Berlin that mad them famous. Brecht, like Heinrich Mann who moved there about the same time, was a ‘member of a growing tribe of ‘Wahlberliner, men born in Hamburg or Breslau, Vienna or Prague or points east or south, who chose to live in Berlin or, rather, The Invention ofthe Tuentieth Century aaa who found any other city intolerable”” Arche rehearsals of Die Dreigroschenoper in 1928, we find Karl Kraus, that legendary figure from the Vienna of 1900, ‘and his protégé, the then-unkniown Rumanian Flias Canetti. There were hhundreds of hem, including, many of the most creative people from all over ‘central and eastern Europe. They included noc only German-speakers bur also people like Christopher Isherwood, Vladimir Nabokov and Mare Chagall, who gathered in cafés like the Romanisches Café close to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gedlachtniskirche or the Café des Westens, “The Megalomaniacs’ Cafe’, on the Kurfurstendamm, The avant-garde of castern Europe ~ Moholy-Nagy, Naum Gabo, El Lissteky — flocked here. Hofmannsthal, Jonger, Rilke, Kafka, all came for a while, bue some ~ ike Alfred Doblin frora Stettin, Bertolt Brecht from Bavaria, Gottfried Bean from Mecklenburg, Ernst Toller from Poznan, Arnold Zac from Silesia and many more ~ came and stayed. Much of Berlin's appeal wwas in its reputation for liberalism and nonconformity, for many of these writers were politically commicred.* Hofmanasthal wrote that ‘Berlin is not the capital ... But it is an overwhelmingly large Germany city, which embraces teveryone who enters it with a power thar cannot be resisted ~ nox so much an turban entity as an epoch’? ‘Willy Haas, editor of a literary magazine and film edicor, who had been born in Prague, wrote: +0 become a Berliner ~ that came quickly, if one only breathed in the air of Berlin with deep breath ... [loved the rapid, quick-wited reply of the Bestin woman above anything, the Keen, clear reaction of the Berlin audience in the theatre, in the cabaret, on the street and in the café, that taking-nothing solemnly yee taking seriously of things, chat [ovely, dry, cool and yet not cold atmosphere, the indescribable dynamic, the love for work, the enterprise, the readiness to take hard blows ~ and go on living.” Some, like the republican poct and playwright Carl Zuckmayer, loved it: “The fir was always fresh and spiced up, as it were, like in the Fall in New Yorks fone did not need much sleep and never got tired. There was no place where you felt in such good form, nowhere could you take so much, could stand up to so many right hooks without being counted ou" “Once you had Berlin, you had the world’, he wrote." In those days, he said, ‘one spoke of Berlin as fone speaks of a highly desirable woman, whose coldness and coguettishness are widely known’, She was called ‘arrogant, snobbish, parvenu, uncultivated, ‘common’ but she was the centre of everyone’s fantasies and the goal of everyone's destes: “Everyone wanted her, she enticed everyone’. It was, he said, | city of crooks and cripples, a city of hit songs and endless talk, with a press that was ‘cruel, pitiless, aggressive, filed with bloody irony, yer not discouraging’, and with criticism that was harsh, nonconformist but fair, in search of quality, delighted with excellence. ‘Berlin casted of the furure, and that is why we gladly took the crap and the coldness.” In an article of 1932, Siegfried Kracauer identified this same quality Ie appears as if this city had control of the magical means of eradicating slae ‘THE CITY AS CULTURAL CRUCIBLE memories. It is presentday and, moreover, it makes it a point of honor of boeing absolucely present-day. Whoever stays for any length of time in Berlin hardly knows in the end where he actually came from. His existence is not like a line but a series of poines it is new every day like the newspapers that are thrown away when they have become old ... Only in Berlin are the «cansformations of the past so radically stripped from memory. Many experi- ence precisely this lite from headline to headline as exciting; partly because they profi from the fact that thei earlier experience vanishes in its moment of disappearing, partly because they believe that they are living twice as much when they live purely in the present." Visitors found Berlin very American: Ilya Eheenburg, visiting it in 1927 after five years* absence, called it ‘an apostle of Americanism’. It was fall of symbols ‘of modernity like the Avus motorway, Heinrich Kosina’s hangars at Tempelhof, the Funkrurm, all of which were caught in the montages of Walter Ruttmann’'s documentary Berlin Symphonie einer Grossstadt. It reached almost a point of madness; and some saw the writing on the wall. Stefan Zweig, coming to the city from Vienna ia the early 1920s, atthe height ‘of the hyperinflation, recalls che spirit of the place in an unforgertable passage: have a preity thorough knowledge of history, but never, to my recollection, has it produced such madness in such gigantic proportions. All values were : red vision of a mythical past, psinted in an changed, and nor only material ones; the laws of the State were flouted, no 1, Cranach's A Golden Age: an inspired fa mythical pas tradition, no moral code was respected, Berlin was transformed into the ‘urban golden age: Wittenberg ~ home also of Luther, and starting-point of the Babylon of the world, Bars, amusement parks, honky-tonks sprang up like [Reformation ~ was an outstanding creative city snushrooms. What we had seen in Austria proved to be just a mild and shy prologue 10 this witches’ Sabbath; for the Germans introduced all theit 2, John Maynard Keynes: in 1930 he foresaw a golden age for the 1990s but he vehemence and methodological organization into the perversion. Along the ‘warned that the path would be hard, entire Kurfistendamm powdered and rouged young men sauntered and they ‘were not al professionals; every high school boy wanted to can some money and in the dimly lit bars one might see government officals and men of the world of finance tenderly cousting drunken sailors without shame, Even the Rome of Suetonius has never seen sach orgies as the pervert balls of Berlin, where hundreds of men costumed as women and hundreds of women as men ddanced under the benevolent eyes ofthe police. Inthe collapse of al values @ kind of madness gained hold particularly in the bourgeois circles which nil Ac haa) been unshakable in thelr probity. Young girls bragged proudly of their perversion, co be sixteen and still under suspicion of virginity would have bbeen considered a disgrace in any school of Berlin at that time, every wanted to be able to tll of her adventutes and the more exotic, the bette" Zweig and others of his generation, # generation that had ben young swemty years arc, saw Berlin asthe apotheous ofthe new twenty cy, ening te word in an unknown diecon, they Knew nor wheres somewhere) they didnot ike. And that was patil so becase the whole procs as Caught for poeity at happened photojoumalan, the docmeney ces Broadcaning sound recording were some ofthe ats that wee efesely bom28, Joseph Schumpeter: the great Austro-German-American economist who invented ‘creative destruction’, the innovative explosion tha generates new industries and economic growth, ‘The Invention of the Tventoth Century us here. In Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), reflecting these new modes, Dablin produced a new literary form, the textual montage, t0 express the new ‘elacionship of individuals to their urban envizonment.” In it “It is no longer the world of objects that stands in opposition before the human subject, but a sociewy chat has itself been configured as a subject, that demands that the individual adjust o its dynamic seructures. The individual mast adjust his ‘movements to the scructures of trafic and rely passively on the means of public teansportatio’." In the end, as he moves through the Berlin of 1927, he hallucinates that he is marching through an artillery barrage at Arras duting World War 1." Though Doblin's novel is often compared with James Joyce's Ulysses, published seven years earlier, the contrast is striking: here the hero, Franz Biberkopf, is “gripped by panie fear, is impervious to the eiy's spectacle, his consciousness remains mute... His tory consists of nothing but its contested demand cht i be allowed to continue’. Spread out on a plane and constructed ‘of quotations, the textual space of Berlin Alexanderplate resembles a city. Just as the pedestrian must make his way through the city, so the story of Franz Biberkopf must make his way through the montages of text" In 1923, replying to a survey of the Vossische Zeitung on the question, ‘Does Berlin inhibit or impair artistic creation”, Doblin wrote: “The city as @’whole hasan intensely inspiring, energizing power; this agitation ofthe streets, shops and vehicles provides che heat | muse have in order to work, at all sms. Ie is the facl thac makes my motor run’. As for Heinrich Mann, so for Doblin, Berlin was a Menschwerkstatt, a workshop for the creation of a new kind of human being” For years, the outside world failed to notice the scale of Ben's achievement, parly and even mainly pechaps because it was eventually overshadowed by the triumph of Nazism. Mann's The Magic Mountain, Klee’s The Goldfish, the new German cinema of Caligar, Pandora's Box and M, the production of The ‘Threepermy Opera, Piscator’s political theatre and the Pirandello productions by Max Reinhardt, the world premiere of Berg's Woezeck in 1925: all gained recognition rather late in the day. Some of those who did noice, like Zweig, saw the whole history as decadent, or derivative, or just an expression of a dying bourgeois order. But John Wille argues that there was much moze "Fiere the formal principles of modernism were applied realistically, whether 0 practical, socially oriented tasks, or to the communication of intelligible statements and messages, whether narrative, objective ot socially critical’ ‘The Origins of Innovation: Expressionism ‘The origins ofthis creative explosion go back before 1918, indeed before 1914: under the old empire, Berlin had already become a hotbed of innovation. By 1914, Expressionism had developed in both painting and theatre; Thomas Mana ‘had published significant work; political cabaret had developed; Berlin had developed a branch of the International Psychoanalytical Association; Max Reinhardt was producing plays, Schoenberg had developed atonality; Gropius hhad designed significane foundations of the modern movement in architecture|i 2s ‘THE CITY AS CULTURAL CRUCIBLE in his 1911 Fagus factory at Alfeld and his 1914 hall for the Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne." Thus “There can be no doubt: the Weimar style was born before the Weimar Republic .. the Republic ereated lite it liberated what was already there” Expressionism was the central illustration of this innovative force. For John ‘illett, the term embodies many strands and shades of meaning: heightened emotionalism, break with traditional society, family and father, and the notion of a ‘new man’ capable of dealing with a new world. Tt was a revolutionary movement without clear aims: it prized emotions and irrational- ism, and used erotic and sexual elements as shock tactics and a call for new moral values. No one can say exactly when and where it began; bat in literature the origins can be raced to Berlin before World War I inthe literary magazine Der Sturm, with Oskar Kokoschka from Vienna a regular contributor, and the group of young posts around the Berlin Neuer Club and ‘Neo-Emotional Cabaret, from 1910. A few Expresionistinfluenced plays date from this time, three by Carl Sternhcim being staged by Reinhardt, though no one then thought of these as such: the word, and so the concept, had not been invented. In any ‘case, Expressionism in the theatre was originally a development of the provincial cities: Prankfure-Mainz-Darmstadt, Dresden, Munich. “Then came World War I and ies aftermath. The experience was not unique to Germany, but from 1916 the antiwar feeling was much stronger there, culminacing ina utopian, near-anarchistic Expressionism, matched perhaps only by the Russians. Eveotually it turned into cynical sourness. It started with the resistance of artists to militarism as early as 1915, and culminated in groups of ‘Activist’ writers and inellecruals which stimulated opposition ro the wa, in 1917-18. The end of che war brought crisis: che sudden collapse of the Prussian regime brought its cultural values and traditions, already discredited by the war, into open disrepute. One reason was tha, though Germany was by now fully industrialized, tere had been no fundamental shift of power or questioning cof traditional assumptions; the ares had remained quite conservative.” As Christopher Innes guts it, “The disappearance of the old social order thus revealed an unbridgeable gap between are and actuality: a gulf that had already been exposed in the plays and operettas put on for the troops’ Ie was accentuated by the fact dha artists served i the ranks and also by the near religious connotations of at in Germany, a product of the comparatively late development of a national culture." ‘Are on a pedestal seemed irrelevant ro the crude existence of the common soldier’ Piscator, in a letter of 1928, referred to culture as ‘the whole literary rubbish-heap of a generation... whose cowardice and thoughtlessness helped to drive us into the trenches’ ‘The revolutionary experience expressed itself fist, and most directly, in the theatre, because ~ unlike painting oF music ~ there actual people spoke their ‘thoughts outloud. Besides, in Germany the theatre had been regarded as a kind ‘of ‘moral tribunal’ irom the time of Goethe and Schilles; it was also scen as addressing the community rather than the individual.® But now the theatre seemed rotten, dead: at the close of a war that had accelerated technological advance and social ‘The Invention of the Twentieth Century mas change the theatre seemed only too obviously outmoded. Its plush and gile and boxes were reminiscent of the monacchy, and its machinery had not been improved since the tum of the century. Regarded as a focus for public consciousness, the German theatre seemed more like a mausoleum to left-wing artists chan a mirror of the contemporary world. So the German cheatre rejected tradition more suddenly and more fundamentally than other European theatres: the experimental period was Tonger and more radical, because society itself remained in upheaval throughout the Weimar period The wat, then, proved twaumatic for che artists of the Weimar Republic nowhere els, except in Russia, was chere such virulent opposition to it; nowhere clse did this opposition give are such keen social concern, collective drive and catting edge. Gropius wrote, ‘This is more than just a lost war ....A world has come to an end.” One immediate result was the historic split in the German Social Democratic Party, some ~ like the young Erast Toller ~ joining the Independent Socialists or USPD who formed their own parliamentary party, ‘others joining the small revolutionary Spartacus Union under Karl Licbknecht and Rosa Luxemburg," The results of the German revolution, when the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) sided with the Freikorps, confirmed theie scepticism, Following the break-up of the USPD in 1922, the seragle within the left became polarized as Social Democrats versus Communists.” The new, politically charged writers turned naturally wo Expressionism. As already seen, che fest Expressionist plays had been written as early as 1910, ‘but it was only after the war that they reached che stage, most notably in Reinhard’ spectacular attempt to create his Volksbahne, the People’s Theatre for the masses in the Grosses Schauspiehaus: a former circus building with seats for $000, which opened in November 1919, with performances like Romain Rolland’s Danton in 1920, though the enterprise collapsed in 1923. The playwrights were among the most inventive, certainly the most arciculate, Expressionists in early Weimar, Prolific and’ hostile ~ to the rules, wo the audience, even t0 clarity ~ they poured out plays eccentric in plot, staging, speech, characters, acing, and direction.” ‘But theatre was not the only place where Expressionism fourished in Berlin at that time, no art form developed in isolation. The market for Expressionist art boomed duting che post-war inflation, as industrialists and businessmen tried to find safe investments, and as George Grose produced his early graphics; Expressionism reached architecture through Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower, above all, the movement came to the notice of the world through the first performance of Das Kabinett von Doktor Caligari in 1919. Caligari beautifully reflects the ambiguity of the entire movement: ‘While the Expressionists did their best, by thei lights, to serve the Revolution, they were in general revolutionsry without being political or, at least, without being programmatic: ther rebellion against stable forms and esmmon sense reflected the longing for renewal, the discontent with actuality, and che uncertainty about means that rmarked Germany in general ‘Almost simultaneously came Dada, an extraordinarily eclectic mixture6 ‘THE CITY AS CULTURAL CRUCIBLE running the whole gamut from left-wing radicalism to theinfluence of Mariner, the Ttalian Fascist, Tt had begun with the first Dada erening at the Cabinet Voltaire in Zarich in July 1916; its common theme, uniting those present, was anti-militarism and rejection ofthe warring states. In Switzerland Dada remained fnarchic, but in Berlin, a year later, the Dadaises immediately embraced Marxism, In 1917, after ewo spells in the army, George Grosz returned 0 Berlin, bitter, angry and convinced of the futility of sociey, no longer interested in art for arts sake, and wanting co protest against the world of mutual antibilation, He met Richard Hlsenbeck, who brought Dada co Berlin. He and Grosz immediately hit it off ‘But dadaism was already in Berlin because dada was a stare of mind, a state of mind which rejected not only the war as inhuman but also che society and the culture capable of producing chat war, 3 state of mind that saw German ~ and European culture as a massive swindle’.* ‘This was Hulsenbeck’s aim in geturning to Berlin from Zurich: German culeure, as he put it, ‘is attacked with all the instruments of satie, bluff, irony and finaly, violence’. The group started to dress crazily, parodying and insulting ‘army clothes, and carried stickers with messages like ‘Dada siegt’ and ‘Dada, Dada aber alies'“* Tn April 1918, in the Neue Sezession Hall, German Dada was officially dedicated: Halsenbeck read the first German Dada manifesto, later published lover the signatures of himself, Grosz, Franz Jung, four from the Zarich Dada fgroup, and twelve others.” They condemned Expressionism as escapism, and called for a new form of art: ‘Affiemation-negation: the gigantic hocus-pocus of existence fires the nerves of the true dadaist and there he is, reclining, hunting, cycling - half Pantagruel, half St. Francis, laughing and Taughing’.” Their motto was ‘Kunst iet Scheisse’ (ar is crap).° They had frequent meetings both during and after the war, when they became more explicitly political; che police, never slow to look for potential subversion in the arts, began to take an interest in them.” ‘At a Dada soirée at a high-class Kurfarstendamm gallery, “The public responded as usual to the expensive invitations printed on handmade paper and paid a hefty entrance fee, only to witness a contest between a typewriter tnd a sewing machine’.” The great Berlin ‘Dada Fait’ of June 1920, with its notorious stuffed soldier hanging from the ceiling, developed the concept ‘of photomontage. OF the 175 or so items, more than half came from the Berlin nucleus; thete was one contsibution from Bea Hecht, later to achieve fame in Hollywood. The Dadaises began to express man as a faccless, mechanical dummy or automaton. Others went ino Verism, a kind of formalized realism, By that time, in November 1918, real revolution had come. Everyone had heen talking about it, but no one knew quite wha it meant. So when it actually came to the strests, Expressionism suddenly acquired a reputation it ‘probably did not deserve: the appearance of a lunited, revolutionary political movement.* The revolution turned into a bitter and savage battle between the Freikorps and their descendants, and the Communists whose leaders they murdered in 1919, helping to explain ‘the savage venom which so strikes us in the anti-militarist, anc-establishment are of the German Left right up to the present day’ ‘The invention of the Tventeth Century 47 ‘The Berlin Theatre The it tory of Dade aed denon hat Reis ackcvenet wa Se ee a oc Se das eatin eta oe ee eee eee en Are eee ter Began asad oemee seatearey eee eee wa oh pal Sa had atone arte a ee eke the People’s Stage, under the motto ‘art for the people’.® It became a major force in the Berlin theatre until the Nazis suppressed it, and was the only audience. Set up in 1890, it almost immediately split into an apolitical and a ‘The theatre was the most notable example of heterogeneity in Berlin's culeusal life, There was direct confrontation between the monarchis tradition culivated in the royal Schauspiel und Opernhaus, the entereainment industry with its ‘opeteta, variety, cabaret, our of-own theatres and night clubs, and the modem sage, There were 30 theatres playing every night in Berlin at che beginning of the cencury ... Nowhere in Germany was the theatre so competitive and nowhere did it pose such a challenge to the imagination of great producers and to the performance of great actors asin Berlin.* ‘The critic Herbert Jhering described the scene on his arrival in 1907 1 was soon evident chat Berlin's theatres differed in all important regards from those I had seen in Hanover and Munich, or indeed was ater to see in Vienna ‘++ In Berlin, the stage was a respiratory organ for the city, a parc ofits very body, as necessary as streets, underground trains, houses, restaurants, as necessary as the River Spree, Lake Wannsce or the Grunewald, as necessary as work, factories and Potsdam, necessary, and so, like chem, taken for granted Ir was not for special occasions, nor for the learned few, it was neither a carnival nor an object of snobbery. Ir was everyday life, but this everyday life was excited, charged, alert, lever, rousing. Anything that curned Gabby was quickly cast out, and whatever promised to stimulate was taken up. Taken 'up? No, mote than that: sucked in, strengthened, championed, asserted Berlin's progressive sprit asserted itself everywhere.” ‘Max Reinhardt was another arrival in Berlin at about this time. He had been influenced in Vienna as a teenager by light comedies, but even more so by cabaret, which was coming. into cities like Munich from Paris around 1900.us ‘THE CITY AS CULTURAL CRUCIBLE Reinhardt soon became famous after his 1902 debut with Wilde's Selomé and his subsequent success wth Gorky's The Lower Depths in 1903." He said that hae broke away from nacuralism because ‘I wanted to act something less hideous and depressing’” He succeeded through tireless attention to detail and his gift for relating even mundane technicalities to the idea ofthe eventual production:® he ran his non-unionized theatre without subsidy and could make a profit with thirty players in a 200-seat theatre. Reinhardt was citciza for ignoring ‘new movement plays' and took a poor view of ‘literature’ geneally, preferring writers who were successful wich a ‘wider publi, like Hofmennsthal or Coward. Even before the war there was & feeling that the Reinhardt theatres (¢he Deutsches and the Neues Theater) had passed cheie peak." He directed productions atthe new Volksbihne, then made ‘way in 1918 for Friedrich Xayssler who was essentially a traditionalist; conically, “for the frst years of the Weimar Republic, che Volksbihne became a synonym for dullness! After the war the Deutsches Theater had much more competition, and Reinhard largely withdrew from Germany for Austria after 1920." Bur, as John Willere concluded, ‘What Reinhardt did for the German theatre has never been repeated. By imagination ~ artistic, eechnical, nancial ~ and obsessive Most sigifcant ofall was the Hanover-born, ex-Viennese critic Herbert Jhering ‘That reflected the enormous circulation of the print media in a pre-television age. In 1927 there were over four thousand national periodicals, an astonishing ‘umber, The major national newspapers were mostly printed in Berlin: Der Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and Der Tag (German National party), Der Reichsbote (Christian National party), Volkischer Beobachter (Nai, printed in Munich), Germania (Centre party), Vorwrts Social Democrats) and Die Rote364 ‘THE CITY AS CULTURA "RUCIBLE Fahne (Communists). Three Berlin-based media companies, Ullscein, Mosse, and Schet, also published national periodicals; chey had top-quality staffs, cheit ‘own modern printing facilities, and smoothly functioning distribution networks; Ullstein even sent its newspapers out to other German cities by air. At Ullstein there was Die Vossische Zeitung and Berliner Morgenpost in the morning, B.Z. 1am Miteag at noon and Tempo in the evening; two weeklies, Berliner Ilustrerter Zeitung and Die grune Post, were printed in editions of several hundred thousands; the monthlies Uh, Koralle and Die Dame were popular among the bourgeois, Ouersclnite among intllecruals."* ‘Besides the newspapers and the magazines, Berlin was the heart of the book publishing world, with no less chan 1200 publishers listed in 1927, though there ‘were major companies in Leipzig and Munich too. Leipzig was the headquarters ‘of the German book trade, bur the centre for the avant-garde was Berlin: here ‘Samuel Fischer had founded his house in 1885, from here he introduced Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Stefan Zweig, Gerhart Hauprmann, Knut Hamsun, Sigrid Undsee, and other major authors. Meanwhile Alfred Hugenberg, a prominent member of the right-wing German National party, had built up a huge publishing empire with dozens of newspapers including the popular daily Berlin, Lokalanzeiger, and in 1927 acquired the Universum Film-Aktiengesellschaft ura.” In this prototypical metropolis of mass media, private patronage also flour- ished. Above all, this was true of che visual Berween the great Beclin art exhibitions staged by the Prussian Academy, the Secession and the Juryless Artists on the one hand, and art for mass con- sumption on the other, chere developed the private galleries which brought the ‘most modern art ra Berlin, Paul Casster, the patron of impressionists; Herwath Walden’s Sturm Gallery, which kept its doors open to Expressionists of all counties even during the war; the Gallerie Flechtheim with its Matisse and Picasso exhibitions, and Goldschmidt and Wollestein, the art salon which ineroduced the artists of the Dresden Brucke and Oskar Kokoschka to art lovers in Berlin; all of them appeared to a broad bourgeois public.” [Alfred Flechtheim, the smartest of the Berlin dealers, gave Grose a big show and a contract in 1923.” ‘There was enlightened private patronage in the provincial cities, too, like that of the Eefurt shoe manufacturer Alfred Hess, or the Book Printets’ Union whose Bachergilde Gutenberg, a left-wing book club, published che work of ‘Travenor; or the Argentine grain merchant Felix Weil, a patron of Grosz who ‘established the Frankfure Institue fr Sozialforschung ~ the famous “Frankfurt School” ~ in 1923. The Malik Verlag survived the curreney reform by eurning, itself into a limited company with capital from Weil.”™ ‘But the Berlin audience was always special. Brecht’s Mann ist Manz was broadcast by Berlin Radio early in 1927 and staged by Engel for the Volksbhne the following year; Weill in two articles for the radio magazine Die Deutsche Rundfunk called ic‘the most original and powerful play of our time.” Brecht’s object was, he said in 1926, ‘a quick-wited audience that knows how to ‘The Invention of the Twentieth Century as ‘observe, and get its enjoyment from setting its reason ro work’ like the crowd at a boxing match; the story should be told ‘in a perfectly sober and matter- oF fact(sachlich) manner’. ‘If Piscator, then, had used the term “epic theatre” to describe is own type of semi-documentary production, with its new technical aids, for Brecht ic meant something rather different: the clear unrecling of a series of episodes so as to tell a complicated story, complete with its social implications, by means of a linear montage in which all the joins should be visible." The Berlin audience could take this; many others would not. 1c was the same a year later, with Brecht’s greatest triumph. ‘The Threepenny Opera hit the Geeman theatre at one of its peak moments, when an open: minded middle-class public was prepared to accept new formal ideas and unexpected shifts of level, and at the same time willing to look sel-citcally at the life and times around it’. People had become used to the Piscator theatre as part of the landscape, chough they might not take it, or the politics of The Threepenny Opera, that seriously." Ic was the same with art. Here, as so often, there was a certain irony. The Novembergruppe aimed to be ‘political’ painters; chey organized exhibitions at the Lehrter Bahnhof, so as to avoid charges of elitism. "The exhibits displayed ‘exciting avane-garde art which was directed at the proletarian masses, who scornfully rejected it. The educated middle class of Berlin, which the Nov- cembergruppe scornfully rejected, embraced the group’s avantgarde art with delight. In fact, middle-class Berlin accepted modern att earlier and more ardently chan anyone else." ‘The Politicization of Art “The fact was that from 1919 in Germany, a» nowhere else, a certain political extremism, an early form of political correctness, became de rigueur in artiste Circles. The Soviet style councils of 1918 ievolved many of the younger writers, theatre people and theie friends, and this affected che theatre.” Many arcs took the rs opporminity to jin the Kommuniseiche Partei Deutschland; and the party faithfully reflected the intezests of the Soviet Union, for which it soon became & propaganda tool. For the Kusnian revolunion had an enormous effect, in Germany: “from 1917 to 1921 ie was, for the rest of the world, as if an enormous explosion had gone of, followed by a succesion of sporadic fireworks of different stes, some of them very Beautiful and unlike anything ever seen before’ Lenin suppored Anstoly Lunarcharsky, who for twelve years was Sovier Minister for Enlightenment (i.e. education and the aes). The Moscow are studios were reestablished as the Higher Stare AreTechnical Studio or Vkihutemas, which united graphics, colour and spatial studies, followed by specialization in architecture, sculpeure, graphics, woodwork, textiles, met alwork and painting, For some years it was arguably the most advanced art school a the world becoming the cradle of Constructivism, a thres-dimensional, sometimes kinetic are, entirely divoreed from natural appearances and con sciously using space as « medivmn."* CGuleually, in these years the Soviec Union and Germany were sill moving266 ‘THE CITY AS CULTURAL CRUCIBLE ‘more of less in parallel; and there was a huge amount of two-way culeural exchange between the two countries. Apart from geography, there was the fact that the Russian and German rovolucions had started from similar causes and had seized power by similar meehods; leaders like Luxemburg and Liebknecht were at home in both parties, So, a8 the modern movement in the arts grew in the Soviet Union, it was in Germany that the development was most closely followed, exerting a direct influence chrough such Russian visitors as Kandinsky and Lissitzky, and through Ehrenburg’s Berlin magazine Veshcb. From this time ‘on, German Communist artists increasingly took their cultural directives from ‘Moscow; nowhere else in Europe was the militantly ‘proletarian’ culture of the 1920s so strongly echoed. German artists developed the habit not merely of visting Russia but also taking jabs there, particularly in architecture and the cinema. A key role in all this was played by a strange body called the International Workers’ Aid or TAH, under Willi Manzenberg: created on [Lenin's instructions in 1921 to organize famine relief for the new stae, it rapidly extended into a vast Soviet-German cultural exchange agency, devored to putting Germany in touch with Sovier ideas, and serving as a most effective propaganda organization, IAH and VOKS, the new Soviet organization for forcign cultural relations, made it easy for artists to wavel berween the two Because the KPD’s organization was s0 efficient, its members lived within a self-contained, almost hermetically sealed world. John Willett has described it: For the German Communists lived ina world of their own, where the party catered for every interest. Once committed to the movement you not only read the AIZ and the party political press: your literary tastes were catered for by the Buchergilde Gutenberg and the Malik Press and corrected by Die Link- skurve; your entertainment was provided by Piscator's and other collectives, by the agitprop groups, the Sovier Cinema, the Lehrstick and che music of Fisler and Weill; your ideology was formed in Radavany's MASch or Marxist ‘Workers School (which a the seat of 1931 claimed 2400 students); your visual standards by Grosz and Kollwitz and the CLAM; your view of Russia by the TAH. If you were a photographer, you joined a Worker-Photographers' groups if sportsman, some kind of Workers’ Sports Association; whatever your special interests, Muenzenberg had a journal for them. You followed the same interests you lobbied forthe same causes. And so all records and recollections cof che German Left in this period move the reader at once into 2 quasi autonomous sphere, where the notion of a successful battle, to take over the ‘vacant politcal, ecanomic and cultural establishment seems entirely natural. So the members, shurvling to and from Moscow, guaranteed that news of the experiments in the Soviet Union travelled quickly to Berlin. Some claim that the achievements of Piscator and Brecht would have been ‘inconceivable’ without Vsevolod Meyerhold’s pioneer work in Moscow; there are indeed striking similarities, and he had employed most of che well-known devices areributed to Piscator in the early 1920s, before Piscator had developed any but rudimentary techniques. But Meyerhold's work was unknown outside “The invention of the Ticenteth Century ur Moscows the first short description in German was in 1925, and his troupe first appeared in Berlin in 1930, 30 it seems that Piscaror developed bis techniques indepencently. Accused in 1928 of plagiarism, he denied that he even had the opportunity." ‘This spire self with particular brilliance in two areas: the theatre, and the visual atts, Ia the theatre, the great names were the creators of ‘epic theatre’, Piscator and his sometime Dramaturg Brecht. The first result was Agitprop — show for “Agitation and Propaganda’: "theatre ac its most primitive” Developed, in the USSR just after the revolution, it aimed to be the modem equivalent of the town ctiet, These was little opportunity to hear about it and none to see it in Germany, 20 Piscator’s group of 1920 was highly innovative; in the beer falls, the dramatic tradition, separating actor from audience, was abandoned. Guough sheer necewiey. Piscator formed his own company after working for the Volksbahne, and staging some early Berlin agitational productions for the ‘Conumunist party. With his new company, his famous new mechanical tech niques ~ the films, projections, ifts, multiple and hemispherical sets ~ responded fo the needs of his proletarian audiences: he used amaceur actors, unsubtle Scripts, short duration and simple staging to keep the action moving and co provide historical aontext and commentary in the background. Later, after 1925, Agitprop became Communist party orthodoxy in Germany, bat by thea it was nothing but a crude propaganda tool; Piscator rapidly came to see ts shortcomings, and indeed by 1922 had already transferred his work to the profevsional theatre. Looking for a convention capable of harnessing heterogeneous themes and effects to political ends, he found it in the musics hall revue, alteady established as a vehicle for political satire in the Villon Rabelais tradition since the Chat Noit in Paris in 1881, and introduced into German theatre at the end of the century; the Café Voltaire in Zurich bad shown its effectiveness, and Walter Mehring had opened the political cabaret in Berlin in 1920." Piscator later said that his aim was a political theatre, not theatrical polities; and, after the revues, any direct incitement to policical action disappeared.” ‘As his commentator has written, “The passing phase of “direce and open propaganda” merely disguised Piscator’s constant aim, which was to create a tage capable of dealing with twentiech-centuryrealtics’* And that is the clu: Piseator rejected aesthetics in favour of actuality.” The core was ‘art in polities so that art could be liberated from political pressures’™ As soon as he gained. his own stage in 1927, the most evident feacure in his work was its objectivity. He was never a card-holding member of the Communist party and throughout he inwended his stage to be 2 "Moral institution’ later he referred ¢o his stage as the theatre of sffirmation (Bekenntistheater). He had stormy relations with the KPD at first since they thought he brought art down to a vulgar level.” ‘About this time she Communists split off and tried to establish a theatre of their own; it incladed Brecht, Friedrich Wolf, the composer Hanns Eisler, the tector Slatan Dudow, and che actor Ernst Busch.®* So Piscator walked a ghroes He consul se ut to aat a prolaran pe while Krone that his theatre depended on bourgeois backing: and this awareness explains the extremes t0 which he went to gain a uniform response by drawing the ‘ete_e_ DWT 268 ‘THE CITY AS CULTURAL CRUCIBLE onto nko a sae ation is sim was co cum his audience ino Brecht himself acknowledged, in one of those curious passages when he refers to bimsef in the third person, that Piscator put on political theatre before the playwright [i.e. Brecht]. He had taken part in the war, whereas the playwright had not. The upheaval in 1918, in which both took par, had disillusioned the playwright and turned Piscavor inco a politician. It was only later and through long seudy that the playwright came to politics But, he went on, “The supporters of Piseator disputed for a while with those of the playwright as to which of the two had discovered the epic syle of performance. In face they boch evolved ie at the same time in diferent cities; P. more in che staging, che playwright inthe play’ Piscator responded, signifiandy, by saying that Brecht is my brother, yet our way of looking at affairs in general is different: Brecht reveals sigificane details of social life, while | attempt rather co give @ view of political affairs in cher ctalty ... leis important for me ro show the course of political realities. Brecht wishes to work obliquely chrough cercain «epochs, thus uncovering their structure: | would fa prefer to show a continuous development. Both saw their work as complementary.™ After 1929, Piscator was che first victim of the politicization of the theatre: the second Piscaror-Bolne closed in thar year, a victim of inflation and insurgent nationalism; from 1930 there was an increasing exodus of artists from Berlin, as Jessner was forced to resign from the Scaatstheater, Reinhardt went back to Austria, Piscator was arrested fon the tramped-up charge of tax evasion whilst Karl Credé was imprisoned in Stutigart for allegedly procuring abortions, the last two after the success of #218; 1991 Ihering med tha ‘the cheats of today bas stumbled into 2 In parallel came Grose’s evolution. The link back to Dada was a direct one: fon 31 December 1918 Grosz, together with Heryfelde, Heartfield and Piscator, hhad become founder-members of the German Communist party, receiving their membership cards from Rosa Luxemburg herself. Grosa’s commitment grew stronger aftr che brutal suppression of the workers in che January and March uprisings of 1919, which split the socialise party. His drawings became much more violent and biter, including a famous one of the wormy skeleton being examined for military service, which bears a striking similarity co Brecht's The Legend of the Dead Soldier. These drawings were published in Die Plete (Bankruptcy), a paper produced by Herzfelde, Heartfield and Grosz from March 1919 on, which was then suppressed and imriediately replaced by others ~ Der blutige Emst (Deadly Urgency) and Gegner (Adversary) ~ to which Grose regulatly contributed, as ~ in a more popular style ~ to Der Kntppel (The (Cudgel), a paper designed for the prolecariat.™ Grosz now, in 1921, specifically affirmed the Soviet party line: chat art was a political instrument and chat che ‘genius’ of the artist must be subsumed to the service of the movement. He began ro aim at a mechanical and objective — ‘The Imention of the Twentieth Century 69 art, which would portray the collective and would be based on craftsmanship father than inspiration ~ a position close co that of che Constructivists and Foturists in the Soviet Union. Grose was closely associated. with the Malik Verlag of Wieland Herzfelde, publishing vireually everything there uncil 1925; in effecr it acced as agent for Will, Munzenberg, organizer of propaganda ‘networks for the Comintern, Eventually the Minzenberg empire grew to a large Size including several newspapers, a fact known to Herafelde who, however, remained independent; Grose must have been cognisant of allthis. He visited the Soviet Union for five months in 1922, but his scepticism caused him to see the new state with a distinctly jaundiced eye. But he continued to gain fame throughout Eusope as a revolutionary ardst, and in 1924 joined with John ‘Wine John Heartfield, Rudolf Schilchter and Erwin Piscator in the Red Group, a Union of Communist Artists of Germany.” But, io successive attempts down to 1923, the politcal imperus to revolution failed; by the start of 1925, the country was stabilized under Hindenburg’ presidency. Yet, whereas in the other western countries the return to order Ineant an eevee to atti enperment, in Germany it continued with che Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition in Mannheim, the Bauhaus move to Dessau, aera Sin nl che nding fe Basher Guebergese book club. ‘Some sce the whole thing as @ kind of charade, without real meaning: the nists could be as radical as they liked, so long as they ehreatened no one. AS Peter Gay puts it: ‘When the democratic Weimar Constitution opened the door ro real politics the Germans stood at the door, gaping, like peasants biden co the palace, hardly knowing how to conduct themselves... Leading German intellectuals, poets, and professors made an informal, largely tacit agreement with theit tate, chey would abstain from criticism, even from politics in general, if the state in turn allowed them to lead somewhat orthodox private lives land hold rather unorthodox views in philosophy and religion ... The world ‘Of the Germans ~ and here the poets helped, as models and spokesmen ~ Came to be sepatated into the higher realm of self-perfection, Bildung, the Schievement of Kultur for its own sake and feee of politics, and the lower Teil of human affairs, sordid with practical matters and compromises Of course, “There was some reason co think the political life of che Republic a spectacle, remote and slightly ludicrous ... Cabinet erisis followed Cabinet ‘risis; in less than fifteen years of Weimar, there were seventeen goveramenss'! ‘in any event, finally crisis came: the Folkwwang Art School ar Essen was closed in 1931, and those at Breslau, KOnigsberg and Kassel also shut, only Dusseldorf tnd Berlin remaining, opeas the Kroll-Oper too was sbur down in economy measures by the state government of Prussia, The state theatres were losing 1.2 million mazks, which the closure of the Kroll could mect. These were economic trgumengs, aot political ones, since the Nezi contingent in the Landag was aot significant”70 ‘THE CITY AS CULTURAL CRUCIBLE Values in Disintegration Underlying the icanic political batles, fundamental as they were, was something even deeper, which gave the art of this period its unique significance: this was 4 society in deep crisis, We can call it the teansition from an older organic society to a disintegrating society that seemed to be leading to an unknown destination. In it, the artists were drawn to what they saw as a city of disintegration and re-creation, che apotheosis of a new kind of urban world; many fele that they were present at the birth of a new human era. ‘Nowhere is this clearer than in Brecht. His early Beclin work, from the frst half of the 1920s, is characterized by a negative, cynical feeling; he declares hhimself ac home in the asphalt cites, where he is provided with modern “deathbed sacraments’ such as newspapers, tobacco and whisky; nature has no romanticism, for the rees ‘pss’ and the birds are ‘vermin’ in the morning light; eventually, nothing will remain of these cities but the wind.** Of cities he wrote: ‘Beneath them there are sewers, within them there is nothing, and above them there is smoke. We were within them. We found nothing to enjoy. We vanished quickly. And slowly they vanish too’ “These are indeed chorales of {quiet doom’. His bitterness de-romanticized the failed German revolution of 1918-19. John Fuegi has reminded us chat from the very frst day, state- sanctioned violence characterized Weimar, from the murder of Rosa Luxemburg ‘onward. Brecht shared with Grosz and others an obsession with brutality and misogyny, and that did not abate with his later discovery of Mars, nor with the understated influence of his collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann.” Brecht did not look on himself asa Berliner, and resisted the scenie backcloths ‘Berlin was the place where a young man of Brecht’s boundless ambition had to make his way to become famous and to acquite influence’, and Brecht certainly saw himself that way, leading a network of followers and believers ‘who would work for a new art of che theatre." He only liked ‘the ugly parts that recked of industry’, and he looked for people's attitudes and reactions. ‘Matieluise Fleisser recalls that he delighted in seeing a corpullent pimp sending four one of his charges on co the street and calling, ‘Erika, your handbag, more jaunty!” He loved films, sports evens, bars frequented by whores and pimps; Ihe was quite content ro write for sporting papers and fashion magazines, compose copy for gramophone companies or publicity verses."* He wrote regularly for the Ullstein magazine Querschnitt, which ‘made money the time- hhonored way: they mixed sports with sex and violence, and attacked all those who disagreed with their point of view.” In 1926 he wroce a terrible advertising jingle for a Steyr car, which ran in the Ullstein magazines; Steyr gave him a car in payment. For Brecht, Berlin ‘really was the modern megalopolis he so loved to hates the vast pile of stone, concrete, and asphalt so many of his poems speak of, where man is lost in a jungle; the seething cauldron of lust, greed, and corrupcion that for him summed up the ewentieth-century world: dreadful, doomed ~ and ‘magnificent’ These images found expression in Mahagonny. As a letter of 1923 shows, he had already named Berlin ‘Mahagony’; it is clear chat Mahagonny stands for Berlin. Ofter, he must have contrasted it with the ‘The Invention ofthe Twentieth Century ar bourgeois stability of Augsburg.** ‘And in fact thar mythical pioneer city of Mahagony, a jetry-buile jumble of brothels and saloons somewhere between the California of the forty-niners and the Alaska of the Klondike gold rush, where everything is to be had for money and the only capital crime is lack of cash, seems a very apt symbol for the Berlin of the middle twenties and early thirties. ‘The plot was quintessential Brecht ~ that is, not much plot at all, but a symbolic statement. “Three condemned criminals decide to found a city in the desert. Ie sto be called Mahagoony and will be based on nothing except human estrangement, Itis a mirage-city where the hunted will easily flock because they believe in a happiness which is not earned but stolen in an instant’.%* This happiness is illegitimate: ‘Brecht wants to demonstrate that the magic of money, alcohol, and sex is, in the last analysis, illusory and destructive.” The 27-year- fold Kurt Weill was so impressed by Brecht’s early play Man is Man ~ which ‘was performed in Darmstadt and Disseldorf but not in Berlin, except on radio~ that he started to collaborate with him on The Rise and Fall of the City of ‘Mahagonony; but this was interrupted by their work on The Threepenny Opera, the greatest Berlin theatzical success ofthe decade, with sets by Caspar Neher. ‘A couple of years before that, in the mid-1920s, Brecht had been converted to Marxism by Dr Fritz Stemberg, author of a recently published book on ‘imperialism; but he remained quite a long way from being a Communist. He Thad also been attracted by Sternberg's assertion chat women occupied a subordinate position in history and in creativity. ‘There are many indications thae Brecht had an Abneigung gegen die Frauen (aversion to women) and that his real views on women, Jews and ‘niggers’ would have shocked many of hi erstwhile admirers if he had expressed them directly rather than in metaphorical form.” In fact, a¢ John Fuegi has shown, Brecht always maintained his distance: “Although winds iight blow strongly fom either the West or East, as either [American capital or Soviet ideology scemed at times to gain the upper hand, Brecht would always be positioned in such a way that he could make progress with or against either wind. He would support Marxism but not join the party. He would attack ideas of property but hold on ro his own’ “Mahagonny was a huge success at Baden-Baden in 1929, launching Brecht into the popular world, but Hauptmann remained as obscure as ever.” By ‘now ~ indeed, even easlie, in the early 1920s in Munich, Brecht had become fan ‘uterly mesmeric performer’, ‘an almost totally irresistible seductive force. He could now usually impose his own will on virtually anybody, and was 0 sifted with an ability to shape and turn any contract to his ovn advantage that ‘stopping him from having his will became wel-nigh impossible’ He exploited his collaborators, most notoriously Elisabeth Hauptmann, who scems to have written much of his output, most notably between 80 and 90 per cent of Die Dreigroscienoper.”™ ‘A comparable spirit is found in Siegfried Kracauer, who had been trained as an architectural engineer and who was Berlin review editor of the Frankfurter Zeiswng from 1930 to 1933. Kracauer was obsessed by what Inka Malder has called ‘the experience of the city asa labyrinth of fragmentary signs's he wanted to explore the superficial surface of the city, not merely to reproduce it, but roa THE CITY AS CULTURAL CRUCIBLE deconstruct it, to discover the reality hidden underneath, which he called the ‘dreams of society. Contrasting Paris and Berlin, he was fascinated by Berlin's relative lack of history, ‘the formless disquiet with which itis permeated’ ‘He wrote of the Kurforstendamm as the ‘Strest without Memory’: If some street blocks scem to be created for eternity, then the present-day Kurfdrstendamm is the embodiment of empty flowing time in which nothing is allowed to last?" ‘On it, a business disappears, and is not merely superseded but is so completely displaced as if it never existed tall... Elsewhere, what bas passed remains fixed tothe place that during is lifecime was its home; on che Kusfurstendamm it makes its exit without leaving behind any traces... the new enterprises are always absolutely new .... What once existed ison its way to never being seen again, and what has just been claimed is confiscated one hundred per cent by today. A frenzy predominates it did in the colonies and gold rush towns even though veins of gold have hardly been discovered in these zones." Now, as Derck Frisby remarks, ‘An ever-disappearing present, i of course, & central constituent of the transitory nature of the experience af modernity, ‘whose concomitant is the destruction of historical memory'.%* But underlying all this is a deep angst: the streets of the west of the city lose themselves in infinity; thar buses roar through them, whose occupants daring che journey ro their distant destinations look down so indifferently upon the landscape of pavements, shop windows and balconies as if upon 2 river valley or a town in which they would never think of getting off; that @ countless human crowd moves in them, constantly new people with unknown aims that intersect like the linear maze of a pattern sheet. In any case, it sometimes seems to me as if an explosive lies ready in all possible hidden places that, in the very next moment, can indeed blow up.” Political and artistic radicalism went hand in hand with a sexual revolution, Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century ~ like the Vienna of Stefan Zweig, or indeed any great European city of the time ~ was a classic example of the double standard, whereby bourgeois women were enjoined to remain respectable while their bourgeois menfolk soughe satisfaction with prostitutes and lower class mistresses. Prostitution was rife: in 1897 the Berlin police registered 3000 prostitutes but estimated another 40,000-S0,000. ‘The birth rate was falling precipitously ~ from 27 to 11.5 pet thousand between 1914 and 1922 — and abortion was very common: there were an estimated 100,000 in 1912, 1 million in 1931, in 1914 half of all German women were estimated to have had one abortion, in 1930 two, and abortions exceeded live births, Even before 1914 ‘there were debates in the Prussian Parliament and the Reichstag on the topic; newspapers charged socialism and feminism with threatening the strength of the nation. As early as 1888 Richard Krafft-Bhing had postulated that advanced turban cultures generated degenerate sexuality that would undermine the nation ‘unless controlled. During che war there was great agitation about the disruption The Invention of the Twentieth Century on of traditional patterns on the home front, the ehreat that women posed to male jobs, and the sexual anxiety produced by che war experience. But the women's Fights movement was very active throughout the period 1880-1908, and cul- minating in is winning the vote in 19182 Underlying all cis, however, was a real climate of violence towards women and feat on the part of women ~ a spirie clearly efected in Brecht, as John Fucgi has shown, Murders of women in Prussia rose from 191 to 365 a year berwiccn 1900 and 1914, causing a panic because the newspapers painted lurid stories, and women living alone were more likely co be artacked.2” And this climate was fathfully caughe by George Grosz, who ~ from 1917, at least ~ was painting scenes of sexual violence in buildings, framed by scenes of the metropolis ouside. His description of the chaotic strect scene intermingled violence and sex with the technology of the modern city. Sereams of women giving birth, jangling telephones, Knuekle-dusters and Solingen knives resting in the trouser pocket of the pimp, Circe curning men into swine, gcimophone music, and murder bby strangling in a dusty cellar ~ all these Grosz called ‘emotions of che ‘metropolis’, which he executed with a remarkable palette of reds.” ‘One view, expressed by Beth Lewis, is that Grosz was simply reflecting the degeneracy and corcuption of urban life, and the pervasive social anxieties labout the role of women. Grosz publicly rationalized them by saying that his paintings represented an attempt to remove sexual taboos and destroy the distinction between ‘secret’ pornography and high art In fact Grosz was ‘obsessed with sex murders even before World War I, and had digested cheap sadomasochistic pulp fiction such as Victor von Falk’s The Executioner of Berlin, perhape the bestselling nineteenth-century German novel with over a million copies sold, which contained graphic accounts of murders, executions, dismembermems, torture, and kidnapping. When he started his sex paincings, Grosz had just been discharged from 2 military mental asylum, He remained morbidly fascinated with this material throughout his life.” ‘What is significant about all this is che images of male inadequacy and sevenge. Jn Gros's paintings we find images of powerful women, attacked and brutally murdered; on the stage Reinhardt produced Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box, ‘where Lulu, the precocious and sexually flamboyant femme fatale, becomes the victim of Jack the Ripper. Grosa’s friend, Oxto Dix, also produced pictures of appalling sex murders and even pictured himself gleefully dismembering a ‘woman; Dix slegedly told a friend that if he had not been able to paint these pietuzes, he could well have committed actual murder.™® To all this experience, German conservatives constantly contraposed an idea, stable, fundamentally cural order. Ferdinand Tonnies’ 1887 sociological classic, Gomeinschaft end Gesellschaft, became celebrated in these years for its contrast “between the authentic, organic harmony of community and the materialistic fragmentation of business society’ And Werner Sombart’s Hidndler und Helden, produced during’ the war but also popular in the 1920s, contrasted western traders and German heroes. Meinecke the historian saw correctly in274 ‘THE CITY AS CULTURAL CRUCIBLE 4944 cat “The deep yearning for he inns nity ofall ay fife and evens in life remains a powerful force in the German spirit’ People desperate Sone conta the ls oder ofthe Wilelnine yas ‘The Wandervoge (hiking movement) was a prime illustration: an enormously influential movement, that claimed thousands of adherents who were looking for an organic philosophy of life. There was admittedly no clear political or philosophical ideology here: many were anti-Semitic, some accepred Jews; some hhad homoerotic overtones, some encouraged girls to join; many repudiated politics, bur some associated themscives with political parties. But they were perhaps united in one respect; as Peter Gay has written, all Wandervogel except the most casual attached an enormous importance to their movement, an imporeance dimly but fervently articulated: as solemn, rebellious bourgeois ~ and they were neatly all bourgeois — they saw thei rambling, their singing, theic huddling around the campfire, their visits co venerable rains, as a haven from a Germany they could not respect or even understand, as an experiment in restoring primitive bonds thac overwhelming ‘events and insidious forces had loosened or destroyed — in a word, ata critique cof the adult world?” ‘Many youth leaders ‘hailed an idealized, romanticized medieval Geemany as a ‘fog rom commercialism and fragmento’ ut any artise committed co the spirit of Weimar really had to repudiate these yearnings. As Peter Gay puts it, ‘By its very existence, the Republic was a calculated affront to the heroes and clichés that every German child knew, tmany Geman pola invoked, andi eumed out, most Germany cher. ished’ In fact, ‘the hunger for wholeness? rurns out to be a great regression bon from a peat far: the fear of modernity. The abstractions that Tonnes Hofinannsthal, and the others manipulated ~ Volk, Fdhrer, Onganismus, Reich, Entscheidung, Gemeinschaft ~ reveal a desperate need for roots and for com munity, a vehement, often vicious repudiation of reason accompanied by the turge for direct action or for surrender to a charismatic leader. As Gay argues, “The hunger for wholeness was awash with hate: the political, and sometimes the private, world of its chief spokesmen was a paranoid worl, filed with ‘enemies: the dehumanizing machine, capitalist materialism, godles rationalism, rootless society, cosmopolitan Jews, and chat great alldevouring monster, the city'2" And this demonology would of course form a powerful psychological underpinning for the Nazi movement. ‘The End of Weimar Berlin ‘And already, months after the Wall Street crash of October 1928, the political storm clouds were beginning to gather. In December of that year the Nazi vote ‘more than doubled in Thuringia, to 11.3 per cent; Wilhelm Fricke became ‘Minister for Education, the first Nazi minister in any state government, and appointed the conservative Paul Schultze-Naumburg to succeed Orto Barming “The Invention ofthe Twomteth Century ws at the architecture school in the old Weimar Bauhaus buildings; a right-wing, backlash brought the sacking of Gropius' successor, Hannes Mayer, at Dessau In 1929 Piscator was thrown out of his own Berlin theatre after demonstrations against his Der Kauffmann von Berlin and soaring deficits: some of his actors then hired him for their touring collective. The recession in 1929 had major ‘fleets on public expenditure, for instance in housing where the financing of building cooperatives by the Haustinssteuer ended; Frankfurt’s housing projects were killed off; and painters clearly had difficulty in selling their pictures.** But then, things went eapidly from bad co worse: unemployment in Germany rose from 1 milion in 1929 t0 3 million in 1930, and 6 million in 1932.°° Even worse, if anything, was the psychological climate. In 1932 Peter Suhrkamp, the publisher, noticed how che young were turning away from Liberalism, filled with ‘anguish, hatred, rage, and noble indignation’ they rneeded only a “genuine revolutionary idee’ What they found was a strange combination, which Jeffrey Herf terms reactionary modernist: anti-moderist, romantic, irationalist on the one hand, technologically forward-looking on the other. Thomas Mann expressed it well when he wrote that “the really characteristic and dangerous aspect of National Socialism was its mixture of robust modernity and an affirmative stance toward progress coupled with reams of the past; a highly technological romanticism’. fe sprang out of ‘Weimar thinking by such notable figures as Spengler and Sombart."* Twas symbolized by the rise of Friez Todt, father of the Autobabnen, who was elevated in 1934 to become Hitler’s representative for all questions con- Cemning the organization and development of technology. Todt, a Nazi member Since 1923, had strong and enduring ties to the engineering profession and its political and cultural eraditions.*” He was the subject of eulogies on his death jn 1941. Todt himself, in 1939, waxed eloquent on the Autobabm as an arc form: “The following are the features that make a road as a totality into an artwork that brings joy through it inteinsic beauty and harmony withthe environment: ‘The ditection of lines ie bound co the land (landschaftsverbundene Linienfinang), Construction remains tre to the natural forms (iuaturformgetreuere Erdbau). Workmanship is based on the crafsman’ pi ciples of building and implementation in che earth (bodenstande Bepflanzun). By early 1933 Weimar culture was in collapse. Piscator, Mart Stam and several architects remained in Russia; writers like Lukacs and Wolf went here, followed by Plievier, Weinert and Becher. Weill drove to France; Richter stayed there; Anna Seghers was arrested, and went there too. Brecht, Eisler and the Hecafelde-Hearefeld brothers left for Prague, Brecht subsequently going to Denmark. Grose hed already left for the United States, followed by Hindemith, Gropius and others, likewise, after a spell in England, Moholy-Nagy. Dix, Schlichter, Fallada and Kastner stayed for a time, along with Engel, Neher and Jhering, Schwitters and Beckmann stayed until the ‘Degenerate Ar’ exhibition ‘of 1937 but then lft, the fist for Norway, the second for Amsterdam, Schlemmer found work increasingly difficult, Baumeister and Hubbuch were forbidden (0276 ‘THE CITY AS CULTURAL CRUCIBLE paint, Griebel was gaoled, Grundig and Nagel were sent t0 concentration ‘camps, Renn and Ossiewky were rearrested.®” ‘And so the break-up of the modem movement began. What survived of it in exile was dispersed and deprived of nearly all its outlers. A great proportion never came back’ ‘Back in Berlin, everything was going dark. The city ceased to play the central role in cinema that it had occupied under Weimar. ‘On the contrary, precisely the cosmopolican side of Berlin life, when represented in Nazi films, served to demonstrate a state of disintegration and debasement that needed to be overcome by National Socialism’.®" Nazism’s critique of modernity was embodied in ‘hemes like blood and soil, the nation, Heimat and Volk, embodied in celebration ‘of mountain, natural or agratian life. But it is more complex than that: Nazi cinema portrays the German city as besieged by foreign penetration, which can bbe remedied only by containment. Perhaps, as John Wille has argued, Weimar ~ and Weimar Berlin ~ could conly end this way; there was a kind of historic inevitability about i. No Greek Are without Greek slavery, said Karl Marx. And similarly no ‘Weimar cakure without Hitler's rise to power. For this culture was the culture ‘of a sociezy whieh from the start rejected all idea of compromise, and by doing s0 made i ukimately impossible for Nationa} Socialism to be defeated except by war. Such intensification of conflict, the emphasizing of diferences rather than their reconciliation, is for better of worse a very German way of looking, atthings, pare of a traditional schematized view which prefers che sharp blacks tnd whites of wood-engeaving zo the French subtleties of old paint or the thin English gradations of water-coloar. The world is thus seen as 2 clash of warring opposites: Hegel’sthess/antithesis, Nietzsche's polarity. Artistically this approach provides contrast; ideologically ic offers certainty. Politically it leads to disaster™ A Verdict: The Berlin Achievement No one could deny that Berlin in the 1920s was one of the quintessentially ative cites in all western history. As John Willett comments: ‘Never in our century has the gale of history blown s0 strongly as it did down the wind- tonnel of those fifteen years and to chose sensitive toi, the artists whom i so buffeted and ested are more rewarding than others who lived in more sheltered aceas: Grose than Picaso, Brecht than Aragon, Tucholsky than the Bloomsbury Group’ And chat cemainé true, even hough finally, as Willett underlines, many of the individual, like Grose and Piscator, can be considered ultimately 25 failures." Their real failure, Weimar’s real flute, was political. In so far ‘8 any country can be said t0 choose its rulers Germany chose Hitler, and bitery as these artists had opposed him iis doubeul if they really persuaded anyone who did nor already share ther own views’ ‘What allowed this amazing burst of creativity to happen? What made Berlin 40 special, 30 different from the other great cities of Europe? For all of them, cleatly, were affected in one way or another, to some degree or other, by the ‘The Imsention ofthe Tuonteth Century ar same historical sea-changes. But there are reasons, nonetheless, to think that Berlin was importantly different. ‘The frst was chat in 1914 Germany was self-evidently che leading economic power on the mainland of Europe, and Berlin was its capital and leading city. ‘Advanced technology had allied to superior education and a high order of education, to produce a city which ~ despite its manifest social problems — was siding the crest of a wave. And this economic leadership resulted in huge wealth creation, which provided the basis for patronage of both an individual and a collective kind, But then, on top of that, there was the defeat of 1918 and the fall of the monarchy, No other country in western and central Europe, save Austria, ‘experienced anything like this; and ic was followed by half a decade of chaos, ‘marked by abortive revolution, and by hyperinflation which destroyed the savings of the old middle class, Small wonder then that ail che craditional ‘values, so painstakingly inculeated, should have been turned quite suddenly on their heads. It happened elsewhere, of course; but nowhere as spectacularly as here. Despite that, between 1924 and 1929 the city thrived again as never before. Germany remained by far the biggest country in western and central Europe, and Berlin, ts capital city, atracted huge talent from all over. Despite the fact that the provincial cities also had a cich cultural life, and that each made its ‘own reputation ~ Weimar and chen Dessau with the Bauhaus, Frankfurt with its social housing ~ almost anyone with a creative spark finally had to try to make 2 carcer in Berlin, ‘And what made Berlin astonishing was the multiplicity of the achievement, Indeed, cross-fertlization was the essence of the place. Art influenced cinema, ‘cinema influenced theatre, design permeated every art. Technological innovation was in everything: there were new arts like cinema, and new forms of old art People would shift from one art to another, and still more they would collaborate across the arts, This was the ultimately open, networked society ‘The very value-system facilitated that. Because everything was broken down, everything had to be rebuile from the foundations: this was cruly Berlin's frst Stunde Null. it was significant that everyone found the place so American: it ‘was American in its rejection of the past, its willing acceptance of che fucure, its working assumption that nothing was permanent and everything was up for grabs, And even this basic belief — chat everything was somehow illusory, without foundation ~ helped powerfully in the ereation of a theatre and 2 cinema of illusion. Yor not entirely: for, as seen, artists ike Brecht and Piscatory Grose and Kracauer did not aim simply to spin dreams. On the contrary: in contra- distinction eo art in any previous city and era, theirs was an explicitly political art. They aimed to open eyes, to strip illusions away, to expose realities, 10 distance their audiences; and of course to shock. Without the polities, there might sill have been technological innovation. But che heart of the achievement ‘would have been lacking. So it mattered that ehere had been a revolution and ‘even that ie had failed; these people were trying to make it happen nonetheless ‘through their art. Without the constant goad of the Soviet Union, withour the cross-ferlization from Moscow, Berlin would have been a very different place. eeat THE CITY AS CULTURAL CRUCIBLE Bur by the end of the 1920s, Moscow too was in process of transformation, as Stalin brutally ended all experimentation and eliminated the experimenters, Therefore, there was a terrible historic iony: even ifthe revolution of the le- wing artists had succeeded, it would axiomatcaly and paradoxically have failed. A tragedy of 2 different kind would have worked itself through, as events after 1945 were to show; Berlin was to experience both tragedies, one after che other, in a fify-six-yea: nightmare chat would end only with the beeaking-down of the Wall in 1989. ‘Nowadays, the astonishing fact is thar so much of the Weimar culture has simply been absorbed in our general western culture; Berlin in the 1920s was truly a preview of the world in the 1960s and 1970s, tothe extent that here is even a reaction against it, as for instance in architeccure. But what is missing is a sense of direction: a desire to rebuild a shartered world, and to do s0 on ‘new and better principles. Weimar had that sense; it was rather that ultimately it led the wrong way." After the war, a few of the exiles returned; but to a city that was 4 ghostly shadow. The relationships with the Communist DDR were often diffcule Breche came back to direct the Berliner Ensemble, Friedrich Wolf became Ambassador to Poland and Wieland Herafelde got a professorship, but anyone silty of ‘formalism’ was likely 1 be criticized and hampered, for instance Lukacs after he was unmasked as a ‘Tevisionis’ in 1956. Brecht cannily gave his copyright to Peter Suhrkamp, hs old friend and collaborator on Mahagonny, as well as taking out Austrian etzenship to guarantee his feedom ro travel." In his last years he lived in the Chausseestrasse in East Berlin, a street that “Though repainted and rehabilitated... sill preserves some of the shopwor antiquity ofan earlier day’. He could look at the Dorotheen cemetery, where his favourite philosopher Hegel was buried, and where he too would be laid in ‘August 1956. Up to his final illnes he would get in his own car and go to the ‘Theater am Schiffbauerdamm; a short distance, but he hated to walk. This was his and Helene Weigel’s theatre, rebuile for them exactly as before the war, when it was the home of his greatest tiumph, The Threepenny Opera.”® They were living with the ghosts of the past; the spitit of Berlin had escaped the ity, to haunt the post-war western world 8 The Key to Creativity through the oceans of history with some primitive tools of navigation: some dirayn from the Marxists, another from Taine’s theory of the creative inilieu, adding to them some recent theory from Sweden and a piece of pure ‘contingency. After testing in the storms of actuality, how reliable docs this composite equipment prove? Before answering that, we need to scress two general points. The fist is that Marxism, as a broad system, is most helpful ~ insofar as it is helpful = in interpreting recent history, the history of the capitalist system and, above all, the recene capicalist system of Max's own day, nineteenth-cencury laissez-faire capitalism, True, Marx also dealt with other systems; but more perfunctorily, and with less sure tools of scholarship. The case studies in this book, by way fof contrast, have been drawn mainly from earler centuries when capitalism cither did not exist (ancient Greece) oF was embryonic (Renaissance Florence, Elizabethan London, Hapsburg Vienna). Even when the system could be said to exist, in notable cases it was a rather special form of existence, very unlike the classic English model chat Marx studied; nineteenth-century Austria and France were by any measure capitalist economies, but this was a capitalism still in course of being grafted upon an older tradition of petty commodity pro- duction, on the land and in craft workshops, and i owed much more to stare promotion and to state regulation than to the British model ‘The second is that the theories are not, need ror, be mutually exclusive. Of course, their proponents would often like to make chem soy they would argue for monocausal explanations. But we do not have to accept that. It is possible to graft a concept of the culturally determined milieu on co a Marxist vine; ‘Marxists would argue that it does intellectual violence to the pure theory, but we do not have to be purists if we do not wane. I is time to stand back and take stock, We sarced this first long journey ‘The Case Studies: A Recapitulation "That said, the main findings of the case seudies will bear recapitulation, Athens, Filth-century Athens was not a sudden event, but the culmination of ‘long process; most of the obvious explanations will not quite do. Athens was affluent, but so were Egypt and Babylon before it; other peoples, the Phoenicians13 The Mass Production of Mobility DETROIT 1890-1915 tration of arage ntepreneteip in he case of lenry Ford eral $0. Though Siemens had ware in howe cum-worlahop, by 500 the fa-emergng German model aw technological tmorationcomieg exer ively rom organized lage-seae laboratory research nie sed corporations ‘Amesican clerical engineering wan moving in the same direction, withthe creation of Bell abs nd GE Laboratories, the mon fundamen diferone tras chat inf orginn, Dero was emily innocent of any telaionshi to the State: the Det of 190, jst ike the Manchester of 170, was wedded tothe ation of producing consumer goods for a consumer market. That indeed, was Aad he ai ol of production the American Mien, which would Only much tage a al cer ter =i itself comtaposd tos very fret model of military-industrial production.’ . a= So chis sory harks Back to th fist industrial revolotion, And here was 2 ote lary: for Hey Ford ae anor Aight a moet whose innovative genius hy aot so mich in what was produced tho ice, a here, the produc ae simos but mot quite new bt ime woh it wat produced. Arkwaight ae Cromford did no inven coton pining bu he did effecively vent cotton spinning in factories Likewe, Ford not invent the automobile, but he did unambiguously inven, mass Production for the mass matker. His novey lay ot in tocnology, but in Indostal organization. How and expecially why he di this, and epecally vihy he should have done so in Detzit the central question tobe Ides in thi chapter, D= {in 1900 brings us back to earth. For it represents the old heroic European Beginnings For the beginnings of the automobile lay in Europe, and enizely in Euro Down co 95, no iformed observer would have Cleve shat Anes cond ‘compete seriously in the infant industry. Even down to 1900, pethaps 1905, no pradent person would have gambled avy on America's chances American technology was about tn years behind European 30 that Ameria found lf sino renvening che automate Lat fal would anyone have waged Europe had established its technological advantage in the years of run-up The Mass Production of Mobilry ‘37 to the invention of the modem internal combustion engine in 1885; it had maintained it over the two decades of constant technical improvement chat followed. Within Europe, France and Germany fought for supremacy. As early as 1860, Fxienne Lenoir’s engine had been the fst intemal combustion engine to be sold in any quantity: one-cylinder, delivering 1 ot 2 horsepower at 100 revolutions a minute, it was inefficient, but it worked and was energetically promoted. Three years later, Nicolaus August Orto, a travelling Salesman from the Rhineland, made 2 major improvement by allowing ‘atmospheric pressure and the piston weight ro return the piston. He ran ‘out of money but then joined forees with Eugen Langen, who brought ‘capital end business judgement to the venture in a partnership comparable to that of Boulton and Watt; they became the largest producers of internal combustion engines in the world. In 1876, Oxo developed his Otto Silent Engine, which used a four-stroke cycle to achieve compression within the working cylinder; this was the earliest recognizable ancestor of today’s automobile engine, burning lamp gas in a single horizontal cylinder to produce 3 horsepower at 180 revolutions a minute. But for the auromobile Fr needed to burn liquid fuel and to be lighter, so as to enable the engine to run faster; and this demanded a radical improvement in ignition which proved difficult to achieve.” ‘Then came the real breakthrough: in 1885, Karl Benz and Gorticb Daimler, who had worked independently, produced a vehicle which was the lineal ancestor of today's gasoline powered automobile, But their vehicle and its immediate successors needed much improvement: in essential components like the carburettor and the electric ignition system, and in solving the problems of reducing weight and increasing power. It was painstaking work carried out in hundreds of small workshops, and it depended on advances fn science ~ in the gas industry, the steam engine, and the scientific study of heat, to name just three. The biggest problem was the delicare fuel-air ‘mixture, solved only in 1893 by Wilhelm Maybach, Daimlet’s mechanic, his improved carburettor: che portable gas-generating plant that made the widespread use of the auromobile possible. The other problem was the ignition, Benz. experimented for ewenty years with a combination of batery, spark coil and spark plug like Lenoir’; the weight and short life of batteries made the engine-driven magneto attractive, but it came only with Robert Bosch’s high-tension magneto in 1902, which quickly became standard throughout the world.* ‘So all the early advances came from Furope; the leading figures were Panhard and Levassor and the Peugeot brothers in France, and Daimler and Benz in Germany; the 1901 Daimler-Benz could be called the first truly modern car in all essentials, America’s later lead thus involved catching up from a standing start and from a position way behind Europe. Perhaps American pioneers were discouraged, atthe stare, by the country’s vast distances and poor roads. Once they became involved, though, chey achieved something typically America: they reinvented the cae, no longer as a luxury for the few, but as a basic convenience for the many; and the consequences, social as well as economic, vwere truly momentous.398 THE CITY AS INNOVATIVE MILIEU American Pioneers Already, in the 1890s, isolated American engincers were heavering away, in ‘workshops all over the East and above all in the Midwest: Hiram Perey Maxim in Lynn, Massachusetts, Ransom E. Olds in Lansing, Michigan, Elwood Haynes in Kokomo, Indiana, and Charles Duryea in Peoria, Ilinois, and Springfield, ‘Massachusetts. By 1900 there were at least 57 such workshops, producing in ‘otal perhaps 4000 cars; by 1904, the number of plants had risen to 121. Maxim wrote in 1937 that ‘As I look back, I am amazed that so many of us began work at the same time, and without the slightest notion that others were working on the problem’ He recalled chat every detail had to be laboriously thought out and individually developed; these isolated pioneers could not offer ‘each other much help." They worked on, in isolation, because the advent of the bicycle showed them the possibilities. Before 1895, Maxim recalled, the bicycle had noe yet come in numbers and had not directed men's minds to the possibilities of independent, long-distance travel over the ordinary highway. ‘We thought the raileoad was good enowigh, The bicycle created a new demand which it was beyond the ability ofthe railroads to supply. Then it came about that the bicycle could not satisfy the demand which it had cteated. A mechanically-propelled vehicle was wanted instead of a foor-propelied one, and we know now that the automobile was the answer? ‘Maxim soon became an employee of the Pope Manufacturing Co. of Hartford, Connecticut, the leading American bieycle producer. And indeed, bicycle firms proved one fertile source for the new American industry: the very fist American ‘car was built and run in Springfield, Massachusets, in 1893 by Charles E. and J. Frank Duryea, bieycle mechanics who had read a description of Benz's car in Scientific American. ‘The automobile owed a great deal ro the bicycle, {including its transmission and wheels, bal- and rollee-bearings, che differential axle, variable speed transmissions, stel tube frames and pneumatic tyres, as well as precsion-engineering parts and manufacturing procedures, above all, interchangeable parts based on machine tools. And early automobile makers ‘could turn to che same suppliers for pars — eubing, gears, chains, spokes, ball bearings and wheels. Meanwhile, bicycle makers Pope in Harord, Winton in Cleveland, Ohio, Jeffery in Kenosha, Wisconsin - began to diversify into cars in the late 1850s." ‘They were soon joined by the established carriage and wagon makers: the Studebaker Brothers of South Bend, Indiana, the Overland company of Terre Haute, Indiana, the Moon Buggy Company of St Louis, and the Mitchell Company of Racine, Wisconsin. They moved less swiftly because they had an established business, changing to cars just after the curn of che century. And ‘meanwhile William ‘Crapo Durant, founder of General Motors, had cut his reeth on carriage building in Flint, Michigan, from 1885." Then there were the engineers, who started with the motor. They were located both in New England ~ in Springfield, Massachusetts, which had 2 century-old engineering tradition, and where the Duryeas had built their car in y “The Mass Production of Mobility 399 1893 — and in the Midwest, with pioneers like Elwood Haynes of Kokomo, Indiana, who followed the Duryeas, producing his first car in 1894, and who was more successful commercially; Charles Brady King of Detroit, who started his company in 1894, went into car engines in 1836, and sold ou to Olds in 1902; Henry Martin Leland, who learned his trade in New England, but came to Deetoit where he established his firm about 1890, developing the Cadillac tout of the old Henry Ford company from 1902 and becoming the leader in Quality production; James Ward Packard, his main competitor at this end of the masket, whose company in Warren, Ohio, made cars from 1900, moving to Detroit in 1903; and Howard C. Marmon, whose Nordyke and Marmon fier in Indianapolis diversified inco cars from 1904. Several Cleveland companies flourished, including the White family concern, the F.B, Stearns Company and the Winton and Peres fms ined, atthe ean of the entry, Cleveland looked at least as likely a prospect as Detroit to become the leading centre o the new industry. In St Louis, George Preston Dorris started his St Louis Motor ‘Carriage Company in 1898; the same year in Pittsburgh Louis S. Clarke and his two brothers founded the Pittsburgh Moror Vehicle Company.” And finally there was a small group of experimenters or tinkerers: they tended to fai, like David Dunbar Buick, who organized che Buick Manufacturing Company in 1902 to make engines, the company was bought by Durant in 1904. ‘Very few of these names survived to become great brands; and some of those, like Buick, ironically did so only bocause others took over their companies after their failure and made successes out of them. American automobile making twat then a very characteristic infant industry, very like electronics in the 1950s. Enury was easy, $0 was failure: in the first quarter of the twentieth century, berween 1902 and 1926, theze were 169 new companies, but 139 disappeared the median life of a company was seven years; calculations show that in the first decade of the new century, between 60 and 74 per cent of all start-ups failed." Struggle for Supremacy: Detroit versus New England Around 1900, i ould not have been clas to anyone which ems wee going te sure and whic ao inde which cy of whic eon ofthe county. ‘he nda was sll widely setere: in Maasahusers and Coneciut and atte Now Yorks in Feaoyvann,n Ob Indiana aed Misour ap well as ie Wiseman and ofcourse Michigan. The frre cenire looked ike beng New Fngland, though thee nas already a din cluster the southern Michigan fonts tndianacOhio region, wih a marked concentration in and around ene, soees.Msschues and Cone made the ones Song, New Englnd Ted especial in steam and csr ea, not gasoline Seg One cha sccomulted expert and allel worknem No ote could {Ran hive preted that steam and ceca ca would soon be elise nor thar Det ould eum abe ofthe pack Ye thi is what happened and st ineniing spec: in 190 the pina sacs in oder of producion wee Machueee, Connection Ins, New York, New Jesy, Oho and Femnsyi-400 ‘THE CITY AS INNOVATIVE MILIEU ‘ania; by 1908, Michigan had taken the lead a year later, Detroit was already the main cent. ‘Whac sor of a city was Detroit in chese first years of the twentieth century? Jr did not impress contemporaries. Charles W. Elio of Harvard described it as “A commonplace and very communisticlooking city’ with “Unhomelike and “seack-up” dwellings’. Deteot in 1900 had been bypassed by commerce and was a cater ‘sleepy, middle-westem city’, as one visitor reported; its port was only the seventeenth busiest on the Great Lakes, and its banks had only local significance. Unsurprisingly therefore the busines elite was slow in entering the new industry, in elation to the country as a whole or even the Midwest. Its members had an established social postion, which they were concerned to enhance by building mansions and joing prestigious social clubs lke che Lake St Clair Club and the Grosse Pointe Club, both opened in 1886.” Ie was fuiely old as American cities go. Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac had established Fore Pontchartrain du Detroit in 1701. He save thar the narzowing ~ le detoit~ of the river, not the Straits of Mackinac, was the key tothe Great Lakes. Late the stall fore became the chi western anchor of French defence against the Bricsh, but che British eelized chat by securing the main base at Fort Frontenac they could cu all she Freack supply lines. Together with all of Canada, the fort surrendered to the Beitsh in 1760, Then, following the American revolution, at the Pats conference of 1782 the British in their cura agreed to evacuate the Great Lakes area “with all convenient speed’, holding the gateway ports as security. Meanwhile the Northwest Tecrtory was created, including Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Mlinois, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota, and in 1796 che British finally withdrew ro che Canadian side of the border ~ to Malden, « few miles below the present Windsor. Surveyor-General Tifin reported in 1815 that the land was swampy and sandy, hardly fi for cultivation, which delayed further seclement." But Detoit’s ceal growth, like that of the entire region along the Great Lakes shores, came afer the opening of the Erie Canal in 1817, which made its location a eriticalentry-poin co the interior. Then in 1844 came the discovery of ion and copper in the ranges to the north and west. Detroit became the seaging point through which this mineral wealth reached the wider world, and ten railroad lines converged on the city. By 1850 Detoit was closer in terms of travel time to Liverpool than it had been to Cincinnati fifty years earlier; and the city’s population began to double every decade.” ‘During the second half of the nineteenth century the exploitation of Michi- jgan’s natural resources ceached a peak: by 1890 ile all states in the production Of lumber. The value of che State's timber production alone, from the 1840s to 1900, was greater than that of California gold in the sume period. That raw material base made Detroit leading manufacturer of ships, carriages, railroad cars and furniture. Raiload cars became a major industry after 1853. Detroit by 1870 wat the biggest shipbuilder on the Great Lakes, the biggese stove- maker in the United States, and the biggest copper refiner in the world; by 1876, the city already had dozcas of machine shops. Is population soared from 46,000 in 160 to 80,000 in 1870, 116,000 in 1880, and 206,000 in 1890. The increase in the 1680s was 77 per cent, second only to Chicago among major ‘The Mass Production of Mobility yor cixies; in population, by 1890 Detroit was already the fourteenth American city” [Even before that, by the end of the 1870s, still no metropolis, Detroit was already a busy manufacturing centre; it covered almost seventeen square miles (4 square kilometres), and had iron foundries, machine shops, carriage and ‘wagon works, stove, car, brass, steel and engine factories, four mills and breweries. Ie could report 929 mechanical and manufacturing establishments, with important firms like the Michigan Car Company, the Pullman Car ‘Company, Samuel F, Flodge &¢ Co. (engines and mining machinery), J. Flower 8 Brothers (engineers and machinists), the Detroit Dry Dock Co., the Detroit ‘Steel & Spring Works, and the Fulton Tron & Engine Works. As we have seen, i had no less than een railroads. By 1890, productive eapacity had doubled and the city was the seventeenth-largest industrial centre of the Unived States, with ‘1716 establishments in mechanical and manufacturing activities. They included firms like the Eagle Iron Works (founded in 1881; manufacturers of engines, boilers, other mechanical equipment), Ireland & Matthews (founded 1889 ‘metal products, later auto parts); the Buhl Stamping Company (founded 1888); the Detroit Steel 8 Spring Works; and a variety of firms in engineering and Foundry products, notably, Charles A. Strelinger & Co. (1885; tools and machinery), John Laver (1880; fine tools, light machinery, metal parts) and Leland, Faulconer & Norton (1890; tools and machinery). Evidently, most of these firms had been recently established; many were doing very high-quality work. "Thus a rich network of relared industries ~ stoves, brass, ships, carriages and wagons and other wood: and metal-working industries including gasoline and steam engines for stationary power uses ~ had developed. Particularly notable was a subcontracting tradition: in the city’s many stove factories, the owners ‘managed the financing and marketing, but production was by skilled iron- moulders on a contract or piecework basis, owning their own tools and hiring their own unskilled.” As a result, ‘oumerous establishments were in existence equipped with the tools, machines, and technical skill for the manufacture of ‘wood and metal sub-products. Specialized automobile factories were cherefore not essential, Orders for parts were given to scores of wood-and metal-working ‘enterprises; carriage-makers were available for the manufacture of “bodies”; and che producers of rubber goods and electrical equipment soon added their contributions’ So mose of the fixed capital in automobile production was provided not by the producers, but by the part-makers, thus spreading the risks in what was a new and hazardous enterprise; dealers’ deposits provided much of the working capital, allowing assemblers to start with very little. Skilled craft labour, then, existed in pockets; but more generally, Detroit had ‘no big pool of skills. Roy D. Chapin, an industry pioneer, recalled in 1924 that "The existence ofthe desized types of skilled labor inthis vicinity had something, though not much, to do with the Detroit location. In fact, we had to import ‘our really skilled fabor from the east in the early years”.® Unskilled labour was fanother matter. The city swept up immigrants: Germans, Canadians, Irish, English, Poles, in that order. Detroie soon became an immigrant town, providing ‘supply of cheap, non-militant workmen with no craft traditions and noyou "THE CITY AS INNOVATIVE MILIEU owledge of unions. Crafts ded away, and Detroit business leaders organized sear Ger inthe Employers Association of Dettoit, were from the beginning om rtcunions ‘The workforce was above all exible, When in 1905 the Tadic industry saddenly, boomed, forniture workers became car aehulierers, paimers became fishers, blacksmiths became machinists, wood- \ Laporkers became body-men.* ‘Thuncy was important too. Chapin later remembered that ‘The banks have plavel nn importne part. There was «great del of prejudice in other parts of sree mt be the part of bankers, pariclaly in the east. They lacked che Trasnes tose hae wan neded. The Detroit bankers had it ad were nor afraid of our sight drafts’.” All the explanations for Detroit's sudden success are lavable bur none is suffeint in tule. The notion that capital was readily arable in Deco ignores the fact thatthe industry was lagey ef-inanced santas hed nerural resources and good transportation, but the location was vcady determined before the need for mass production, New England, roo, ‘eid latour and industcal facies. Detroit's location, labour and equip rae Bee tees than thove of Toledo, Cleveland or Buffalo, all of which seat ac ealy ae Dearie Though ithad « diversified industria base, incheding SEERee Hieyces and. petrol engines, plus a host of machine shops and Teena, beher ches inthe North-East and Midwest had these roo; chey were seanarseary bat nota sufficient condition. Chicago, Pittsburgh and Cleveland probably had superior access to consumers as well as to materials.* eondile romans mystery, In 1900, Detroit was by no means the favoured canlidne to tke command ofthe automobile evolution by 1940 is dominant sae Nas asured. ‘The industry's historians agree thar there was nothing prodestined about this: it depended largely on factors of personality and business leadership.” A surprising number of pioneer inventors and manufacturers Fppaned tobe bow inthe iy or else by ~ Ford, Olds, Buick, King, Leland — aaa vrae companies led as early as 1907; their evident success artracted capital as eresiacy enterprises, giving cumlave locational superiority. AS one industry historian has summed i up: So it comes down to a matter of men, With due allowance for the influence of ceonomic and geographic forces, Detroit became the capital ofthe automotive Fingdom because it happened to possess a unique group of individuals with bork business and technical ability who became interested in the possiblities ff the motor vehicle. Some had grown up in the city or in neighbouring Commiinties ~ Olds, Durant, Ford, Joy, the Dodges. Orhers, like Leland and King, settled chere for business reasons that had nothing co do with horseless carciages. "To suggest that these men were blind instruments of impersonal forces is nonsense, None of them had £0 go inte automobile manufacrarings all were ‘Toing well enough for themselves in other lines. Thar thei environment was favorable, perhaps more favorable than it would have been anywhere els, can be conceded, but it did not operate automatically. Henry Ford made two false farts and David Buick died in poverty, while Maxwell and Briscoe went off te Tarrytown to make automobiles because they found Detroit unreceptve, CE TT “The Mase Production of Mobility roy [Nor did the Detroiters enjoy special privileges in the form of preferential rail rates, tatiff favours, or inside access to capial” New England helped by making mistakes. The Pope Manufacturing company ivas the biggest competitor, with factories in Hartford, Toledo, Indianapolis lind Hagerstown, and a wide range of cars. But it disintegrated, because it failed to get its models on a profitable basis ac the same time, and perhaps because the Popes failed to see che car as other than a luxury item.” As one hrorian puts it: “The automobile industry in New England was thus like the seed that Was sown on stony ground ic grew rapidly at fist bur lacked staying power. It certainly did not ateact anything like the quality of leadership that Pomgregated around Detroit. Maxim, Knox, J. Frank Deryes, and the Stanley brothers were all primarily technical men, not vitally concerned with the business end of automobile manufacturing’. But the tciumph of Detroit was the triumph of a few individuals. Their stories must now be told. ‘The Move to the Mass Market ‘Three of them, Henry Ford, Ransom E, Olds, and Charles King, were over- whelmingly responsible for the origin and development of Derroit and the ‘urrounding territory as the centre of the automobile industry. The cars they made and he companies they established were successful, while many of those fade in other cities were not. The Decroit successes stimulated more local effort and attracted others from ocher districts "The basic reason was that Detroit got into mass production and ies om: petitors did not. In 1903 the automobile was still a luxury vehicle selling at '§2500-$7500 (or, at the prevailing rate of exchange, £500-£1500), though Winton and Haynes-Apperson were selling $1000 models and Olds had a $650 roadster. New firms were starting in Michigan: Cadillac, Packard, and Detroit ‘Automobiles were all in Detroit by the end of 1903. Nearly all these firms still assembled parts made by others, though the trend to the self-contained plant had already begun. By the end of 1903 Michigan was already producing nearly half of all the motor vehicles in the country and Derroit was becoming an increasingly dominant ceatre, ‘The beginnings of mass flow-line production were seet in the Packard and Olds companies." ‘Detroit's advantage, alceady by then, was that it made the cheapest cars; this was due to internal economies of scale, since it was producing ewo-ffths of all the nation's cars, but in turn thar was because it was tending to the lowest price end. Scores of entrepreneurs had been attempeing mass production of heap popular cars before Ford, both in Detroit and elsewhere. Charles Duryea in 1896 had written a lester about the need for a simple, cheap car for the masses; the English Adams-Hewite automobile was advertised in 1900 as a cheap small car, with standardized parts, for the common man. But the real pioneer was Ransom Eli Olds. An Ohioan by birth, Olds starred a car company in Lansing in 1897 but lacked capital and labour; nonetheless, he managed to405 ‘THE CITY AS INNOVATIVE MILIEU establish a new company in Detroit in 1899, When its factory burned down in 1901, the company was forced to concentrate on a one-cylinder cheap runabout, the curved-dash, which proved a success: it was the first low-priced car produced {in quantity, selling 5000 in 1904. Olds’ tiny runabout was the early success of the industry, with production that rose from 2500 in 1902 co 6500 in 1905. But, at chat point, the only way to produce 2 car for this low price ~ an average $718 in 1904, at a time when the average touring car cost at least $2000, or £400 ~ was “to offer an outmoded design using obsolete technology ... a runabout, a two-seater, which in most instances amounted to a horscless ‘carriage with an engine mounted underneath. Of light, flimsy construction, it ‘was not suitable for use on the rutted highways of the day. Irs main competitor, known as a touring car, was much more expensive uild a lot of autos. He was determined but, like everyone else at chat time, he didn'c know how’. Ford's later statement that he got the idea from meat packing was a rationalization long after the fevent; they worked it out as they went along, and had no idea they were ‘making history.” "The move to Highland Park, the largest building under one roof in Michigan, occurred in 1910-11, Here, conveyors, sides and rollways were introduced in 1912-13, the magneto coil assembly line in early spring 1913. Ford describes, the critical moment. ‘Along about April 1, 1913, we first tried che experiment ‘of an assembly line. We tried it on assembling the fy-wheel magneto ... I believe that this was the first moving line ever installed, The idea came in a feneral way from the overhead trlley chat the Chicago packers used in dressing bech."™ When improved ic cut time from 20 fo 5 minutes. ‘Thence, progress ‘was eapid: chassis assembly was cut from 12 hours 28 minutes to 1 hour 33 ‘minutes; motor assembly from § hours 54 minutes to 5 hours 56 minutes. By Spring 1914 Highland Park could build 1200 cars a day: it was a system in “Continuous motion’, with a ‘kine spirit’, with a circulatory system as elaborace and vital as that of the human body. The results in productivity were spectacular: Ford employed under 50,000 men by the early 1920s; with the production methods of 1903, he would have needed more than 200,000." As Sorensen pat ig, “What was worked out at Ford was the practice of moving the work from fone worker to another until i became a complete unit, then arranging the flow fof these units at the right time and the right place to a moving final assembly Tine from whick came a finished rroduct’, a system essentially developed between 1908 and 1913. The ‘complete synchronization’ of the whole operation was the difference between an ordinary assembly line and a mass production one, land was only worked out at Highland Park after 1914. ‘Whar Ford thus achieved was remarkable: he inverted the normal laws of business. ‘Price fst, then cost, was a paradox. It ran counter co prevailing business practice, but Ford made it work ... We first reduced the price to a point where we thought the most sales would result; then we went ahead and tried to meet that price’ As Ford's biographer writes, “To take the lower profit om the larger volume was of course an old principle in manufacturing, and thousands of companies in hundreds of industries had proved is validity; but never on the scale of the Ford Company. For what Ford had proved was that every time the company cut prices it tapped a new layer of demand thar che number of these successive layers was treater than men had suppored; and that as chey went lower the layers grew bigger. Further price reduetiors meant new enlargements of the market, and ‘The Mass Production of Mobility 49 acceleration of mass production's larger economies, and greater aggregate profits” Ford raisd the price of is Model T by $100 in 1903-10 to pay forthe Highland Park plant, sling 18,664 cars. For 1910-11 he cut the pre ofthe tourer from 5850 to $780 and sold 34,528 The price was $850 in 1908, $950 including txtas In 1908, $780 in 1910, $690 in 1911, $600 in 1912, $550 in 1913, $490 in {9t4, $40 in 1915, and $360 in 1916, Ie was now only half the price of the next relly good car. Thence came a reversal: the price climbed ro $450 in 1918, snbich may help explain why Ford was so passionately anti-war, before falling Pack to the 1916 level of $40 in 1920, o $415 in 1921, $348 in 1922, $295 in 1923, and $290 in 1924; ths last was the all-cime low." Parts too were extremely cheap in 1914, a gas tank cost $3, a muffler $2, a sarting crank (code name HERNIA) 75 cents, a wheel $5." The farmer could buy a Model T for less than a good team of horses, and spare parts could be bought for 50 cents a Overall, allowing for changes in money values but ignoring design improve ment, the price of a Model T fell by 85 per cent in real terms berween 1904 Ind 1924." Ford repeated: ‘Te has been my poliy to force the price ofthe car own as fast as production would permit’. Since car prices are not determined competitively inthe usual sense, but in terms of quality/design competition twithin price ranges, Ford acquired a remarkable monopoly power atthe bottom nd of the market, From 1903 t0 1908, the proportion of cheap cars (priced at $1375 and less) bad steadily decreased from about ewa-thirds to one-third, but then the send ceversed, until by 1916 che share reached 90 percent; this was by no means all due ro Ford, bot clearly the Model T impelled it. Even by 1910 the United Staves was building 200,000 cars a year, as many asthe rest of the ‘world put together, obviously the cheap ear was wining out. Ford’s postion weakened only in 1925-8 when Chevrolet and Essex slashed prices to invade bis territory." ‘During the years 1911-16, chen, Ford made the car into a mass consumer ‘object. In the ten years to 1914 the automobile indusry rose from 77th ro 6th place among American manufactures, while Ford rose £om virtually nothing fo produce two-fifths ofall cars by 1913. By that date Ford with 13,000 workers produced 260,720 cars; the 299 other manufacturers with 66,350 only 286,770. Ford's market share rose from 9-4 per cent in 1908 ro 20:3 per cent in 1911, 0 39.6 per cent in 1913 and to 48 per cent in 1914; by thas last date, it made'no Jess than 96 per cent of cas costing $600 or less. All this was done out of profs, without borzosving. On every $100 of sales in 1913-14 the company showed profes of $3150, and sales were 12.74 imes the plant inventory against 3.67 for General Motors (GM). By then the car cost only $550, Gross revenues ‘were $425 million in 1912 and neaely $90 million in 1913." By 1920 every ‘other car in the world was a Model T, with cars coming off the assembly lines every hree minutes. ‘Thus Ford implemented his basic policy: ‘to reduce the price, extend the ‘opetetions, and improve the article’ "The Ford Model T was built so that ‘every man could run it. Ford mass production made it available to everyone.a ‘THE CITY AS INNOVATIVE MILIEU Ford wages enabled everyone ro afford it’ The wage policy was ‘the forerunner and then the example throughout Amesican industry!” Ford summed i wp: all other considerations aside, our own sales depend ia a measure upon the wages we pay. IF we can distribute high wages, then that money is going to be spent and it will serve to make storeheepers and distributors and manu- facturersand workers in other lines more prosperous and their prosperity will be reflected in our sales. Counery-wide high wages spell country-wide prosperity, provided, however, the higher wages are paid for higher production." “The $5 basic wage, which Ford introduced in 1914 to everyone's astonishment, also eut annual labour turnover from 53,00 (ona total force of 14,000) to only 6508." It involved paying unprecedented high wages to unskilled workers. “The rank and file of men come to us undelled;chey learn ther jobs within a few hours ora few days ... These men are, many of them, foreigners, and all that is required before they are taken on is that they should be potentially able to do enough work 0 pay the overhead charges on the floor space they * Ford defended his approach: ‘| have heard it said infact 1 belive itis quite a current thought, that we bare taken skill out of work. We have not. We have pu in sil, We have put a higher skil into planning, management, tnd tool building, and the results of that sil are enjoyed by the man who is nor hile’. Detroit by this time was «city of immigrants who reared children as their peasant forebears had, for their income parental large numbers of boys, cotaly tineducated, earned $7.70 to $1.80 a day atthe age of sixteen. In 1910 Ford was stl sixth employer in the Detzoit area with only 2595 employees, but cis Shor up £0 13,198 by 1913. In Deceit, «city of 45,766 people in 1910, the foundry workers, common labourers, press drill men, grinder operators and other unskilled and semi-skilled workers were likely to be Russians, Poles, (Croats, Hungarians or Italians; only the skilled workers were American, British or German." What made it possible «9 use this labour force was Ford’s hom-hierarchical organization: “the Ford factories and enterprises have no ‘organization, no specif duties antaching 1 any position, no line of succession fo of authority, very few tiles, and no conferences? ‘All of our people have thas come up from the bottom. There isnot a single man anywhere inthe factory who did not simply come in off the street. Ford had solved the problem with which Arkwright, at Cromford, had grappled in vain; how to Weld a gagale of peasants ito 2 disciplined indasril army. Ford alo, remarkably, invented justinsime production, ‘We buy only enough to ft into the plan of production, taking into consideration the state of transportation at che time. E transportation were perfect and an even flow of materials could be assured, it would not be necessary t0 carry any stock whatsoever. The carloads of materials would arrive on schedule and in the planned order and amounrs, and go from the railway cars into production. That would save a great desl of money, for it would give a very ‘The Mass Production of Mobility as rapid rurnover and thus decrease the amount of money ted up in material." Elsewhere he attacked the incompetence of the railroads, including their lure to make guaranteed deliveries on time. At the other end, Highland Park had no storage space: everything went out immediately, and 90 per cent of cars had cash-on-delivery bills of lading.™ If he could have overcome the problem of the unreliability of che American railroads, Ford would have fnrcipated Toyota by half a cencury. Ford and the Detroit Elite ‘What was i tha allowed Ford to innovate when others failed? As always, with hindsight it is easy to see that he stepped into a wide-open market of vast proportions. To quote the aphorism of another, almost contemporary entrepreneur, Henry Kaiser, he found che need and filed it. But there were lierally scores of other Detroit producers who might have done so; Olds nearly achieved it but the others failed to recognize the opportunity. Why, when they lived and breathed an auromobile culture, should chey all have missed the chance? Donald Davis chesis is that ‘the old families spurned the mass marker when they entered the aucomobile industry’, making luxury cars but failing to develop the volume business needed to conttol the industey or the local economy.’ ‘Thus, they lost command of the industry just as it entered its most productive period: in 1905 they had SS per cent of national production and nearly 100 pet cent of the city's; by 1910 the figures were 2 and 3 per cent. They were weakened by the decline of the industries they had founded ~ wholesaling, mines and forests; they sold three major companies to GM and Studebaker and declined to accept stock as compensation." “Even though they originated the local auto industry, by 1910 they had allowed hei social prejudices o cost them control cover ie “Conspicuous production’ killed them.” Detroit automobile making was not, 2s Rae has argued, ‘a democratic technology's the data show Detroit’ induseial leaders to have been atypical carly twentieth-century American business lite; they were overwhelmingly native-born, well educated, and 70 per cent of their fathers were businessmen and professionals, with more chan a thed being big businessmen; their wealeh was more often inherited chan acquited. ‘The luxury car manufacturers, in particular, tended to be Derroit-born and to have come from big business families. They had financial links with the city’s leading manufacturing elite, the makers of railroad cars, of stove companies, as well as with copper mining and smelring, lumber and sawmilling, and land speculation.” ‘They formed an extremely tightly organized and interconnected group. The linchpin was undoubtedly Senator William C. MeMillan, who served on the boards of no less than fourteen Detroit manufacturing and transportation companies inten of them as secretary and creasuer. The elite car companies, especially those founded by railroad car company magnates, produced for the upper class; even Olds gave up producing cheap cars after forming the Reo416 ‘THE CITY AS INNOVATIVE MILIEU Motor Cat Company; Packard was a classic case of a car that appealed ro the stodgy, respectable tastes of che American upper class; Henry Leland ran Cadillac on the basis of quality achieved by perfectly interchangeable parts, but used it to produce a luxury car. Two out of thee of che elite group's ears went to the cop of the price pyramid. Even the middle-class companies, like Dodge, moved upmarket as soon as they could."® Early on, Ford got this clte to pay for his mistakes and then formed his company withour thie help, succeeding because che produet incorporated seven years, 1896-1903, of costly research, The stockholders of the Detroit Automobile Company included key Deeroir figures such as MeMillan and William C. Maybury, che mayor of the city." They put up $15,000 in July 1899; by the time they gave up, in the aurumn of 1900, the venture had cost them $86,000 and not one car had gone into production. Later, of course, Ford justified himself: he said his upper-class associates wanted to make expensive cars for the minority. He idenefied with the lower classes, whom he regarded as his peer group, and targeted them for his sales; his associate William Stout observed that he was the only one who did not have the ides thar he was in the luxury business. To find backers for the Ford Mocor Company, he had to look lower in the social stratum, especially to Malcomson, a Scots-born coal dealer and an inveterate gambler. Yer, despite his rustic populist background, Ford came from prosperous stock." And in reality, he was no outsider: ‘Doors did not slam on him they ‘were opened to him ... no other pioneer automobile company began with backers of such stature such influence, so much cash in ready reserve. Against this beginning, most other companies of the time look like small bicycle shops’. True, almost one-third of Ford's leadership team was foreign-born, four times the proportion in middle- and upper-class firms; more than two" fifths came from working-class or farm families, very few from business, ‘executive or professional backgrounds. These small investors mainly had little ‘money: even Couzens had not previously achieved much business succes." ‘Starting with only $28,000 in cash, the Ford Motor Company flied with disaster durin its fist month’, ending with a balance of only $223.65." Te is signiicane then that the Model T was ‘the farmer's car’ ay we have seen, Ford was nor the only entrepreneur to conceive of a cheap ear, but he ‘was the only one to stick with it. The reasons must be complex, but all observers agree that Ford hated luxury; his social background is insufficient ro explain chis, since one-sixth of Detroit auto founders were farmers’ sons and Ford came from a well-to-do family. Ford deliberately distanced himself from the tich, never ideneifying with them, ¢0 such an extent that when he visited ‘J. Morgan he observed that it was very interesting to see how the rich lived. Symbolically, when Ford became very rich himself, he buile his new house not in Grosse Pointe among the elite, but at the other end of the city near his birchplace, on the banks of the River Rouge in Dearborn."* Similarly, Couzens later said, “They [the upper class] hate me because I won't conform. I'm still a poor man as far as they are concerned’. Both he and Ford responded co their social isolation by identifying with che country’s working, poor, fantasizing about their poor origins." . a ‘The Mass Production of Mobility 47 ‘Thus, as Davis concludes, ‘In Detroit, power after 1910 increasingly depended fon coming to terms with the emerging echos of mass production. This accom= rmodation the pre-automotive class were reluctant to make’ It was a mistake which New England had made earlier, and from which the Detroit elite failed to learn." ‘The Rise of General Motors By 1913-15 no’ other manufscturer could compete with Ford: the enormous cost apart, it would have taken one and a half to two years to put a car on 10 the market, during which Ford could cut che price below the level at which the now car aimed so compete, But thence, Ford's power cost him dearly. In his rising years, he had taken very bold decisions in defiance of trends: the ‘concentration on the cheap car, the freezing of the Mode! T design, the lowering ‘of prices. But then, because he refused co establish any formal hierarchy, his firm became completely dependent on his whim; he crested a power vacuum in which his subordinaces fousht for position and any opposition ro the Model T seemed like betrayal.” And this vacuum revealed that, as John Kenneth Galbraith later memorably put it, ‘if there is uncertainty as to what 2 business- rman is, he is assuredly the things Ford was nor.” With no plans to develop ‘or replace the Model T, he was left only with the need ro dominate ~ which perhaps could be explained in psychoanalytic cerms.!* ‘The decline can be precisely daced. Couzens resigned from Ford in 1915 because, as he said, he would work with Ford but not for him, Couzens was an organizational genius, creating a dealer organization that put incessant pressure on the factory; according to Sorensen, everyone, including Ford, acknowledged him as he driving force. The business eflieency of the company had been largely due to Couzens; Ford believed the business office was an cvil to be endured, and began to be irked by Couzens’ economies and his domineering Ford Motors in its rising years had been nothing if not a team effort Sorensen, again: Without the bulldog driving energy of Couzens in handling the purse strings and in constant nagging of dealers and branch agencies, the Ford company ‘would have fallen apart almost before it had been put togetber, Without Harold Wills perfectionist mind, the early Ford cars would nor have had sufficient mechanical excllecce for evolution into Model T. Without the genius ‘of Walter Flanders in arranging production machinery and in cuxting supply and inventory cost, the wiy would not have been paved for economical ‘production of Model T, and the moving assembly line, upon which American mass production depends, would have been long delayed." But that teamwork ceased abruptly. After the break with Couzens in 1915, Ford took sole command and the company was never so successful again. There followed a row with the Dodges over dividends, which Ford kept back to payant ‘THE CITY AS INNOVATIVE MILIEU for the new blast furnaces and the furure Rouge plant. After the company reconstruction of 1919, when Ford in effect bought out al the other stockholders, he acquired a quite unprecedented power over his company; even Rockefeller never held more than two-sevenths of Standard Oil, and J.P. Morgan owned ven less of US Stecl. This left the company dependent on Ford’s whim; and Ford was ageing rapidly." ‘Meanwhile, a huge shadow had risen over the Ford horizon, in the shape of General Motors. GM had originated in a meeting between William C, Durant, ‘2 Bostonian reared in Michigan, who had developed Buick, and Benjamin Briscoe of Maxwell-Briscoe Motor Co., who subsequently pulled out; but by 1910 it had also taken control of Cadillac, Oldsmobile and Oakland.”* “The year that the Model T was born ~ 1908 ~ was also the year that Durant, having Secured a firm base at Buick, set out to conquer the auromorive world’. He id not originate the idea of a model for each market level ~ Pope had made ‘awkward attempts in that direction ~ and itis doubtful whether he ever worked ‘out a definite programme. Bus be put together ‘a superficially impressive ‘structure’ between 1908 and 1910, embracing Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac and Oakland (a subsidiary of the Pontiac Bogzy Company), several smaller pro- ducers, and parts-makers including Northway of Detroit (engines), Champion {park plugs) and Weston-Mote of Flint (axles). He found it hard to raise ‘money, because the conglomerate was not attractive co investors." “By 1910, the affairs of General Motors were in chaos’. A New York-Boston banking syndicate reorganized the company, getting rid of Durant. They found it very dliffcule co recruit suitable managerial staff and finally found it among self- trained people like Charles W. Nash and Walter P. Chrysler, both midwesterners (che one from Illinois, the other from Kansas) who had acquired expertise the hard way; the first had no education in engineering, the second had acquired it by cortespondence course.” ‘The Chevrolet Company was founded in 1911, promoted by Durant after his departure from GM and eventually providing his route back; by 1915 Durant had formed a new Chevrolet Company based in Delaware with the intention ‘of competing with Ford and Willys-Overland; by 1916 this company owned GM. At the same time Durant founded another grouping, United Motors, incorporating parts of other specialized enginecring and electrical companies in various East Coast and Midwest locations, which eventually merged with Chevrolet-GM to form a new GM in 1918. In this mergec a new actor entered the stage: Alfred P. Sloan. ‘Mr. Sloan was tall, quiet and cool’ He had attended the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- nology, completing the’ electrical engineering course in three years, and had {immediately gone into management. In 1899, assisted by his father, he paid {$5000 for the Hyatt Roller Bearing Company of Harrison, New Jersey. The ‘company grew rapidly with the industry; Sloan sold it for $13.5 million in 1916, in tarn becoming president of United Motors, the parts and accessories company ‘of which Hyatt was now a subsidiary; here he created a general office ‘and established uniform accounting and statistical procedures."* Sloan, vice president of the ‘new’ GM from 1918, worked out his reorganization plan in 1920 and offered ie to Ducant, who frst accepted it and then set ic aside; Sloan “The Mase Production of Mobility 49 was going to resign until word reached him chat Durant had departed, Du Pont tnad bailed the company out on condition that Durant resigned; Pierre du Pont took over as president but knew little about cars, and left management to Sloan as executive vice-president." Sloan's resulting reorganization of GM in 1920 was his alone." As is well known from every elementary textbook of management, it essentially consisted in allowing the operating divisions to retain ther autonomy, while coordinating and controlling them in the interests of the corporation as 2 whole. Executives of each operation had unlimited responsibility for it, but certain central ‘organizational functions were necessary. Sloan achieved this by regrouping the ‘operating divisions, including in the general ofice exccutives co administer the activities of groups of divisions, expanding staff functions in the general office land uniting these into an advisory staff, and enlarging the functions of the ‘group's financial and accounting units. The car group included the divisions that made and sold complete motor cars. There was an overall financial control scructare for the corporation but also control by the chief executive of each init. Soon, however ~ in what seems to have been a fortuitous event ~ the managers of Olds, Oakland, Cadillac and Chevrolet, survivors from the earliest years, were replaced, making it easier to institure uniform accounting. and statistical methods." ‘Soon, Sloan sct systematic policy changes in train, First, che quality of all products was raised up to the levels of Buick and Cauilac. Then, the policy twas developed of bracketing the marke: having each division produce for a specific price bracket." In the words of the company’s 1923 Annual Repor, ‘In 1921 a definite policy was adopted. The Corporation should establish complete line of motor cars from the lowest to the highest price that would juscfy quantity production’. Cadillac sold in the highest price bracket, Buick the next, followed by Oakland and then Olds, with Chevrolet in the largest- volume, lowest-price market; in 1925, the Pontiac was introduced into the bracket just above Chevrolet. This completed the policy of ‘a car for every purse and purpose’. Unlike Ford, Sloan also decided noc to engage in vertical ingegration from beginning to end, but o buy in components:” “There would bbe no great plane at General Motors comparable co the one chen rising on the River Rouge’ “Then Donakiton Brown, brought in from Du Pont, overhauled the entire statistical and accounting system. Forecasts, systematically developed, became the basis for statistical controls aver purchasing of materials investment and ceven the price of the product. Thus, between 1921 and 1925, GM worked out highly rational and systematic procedures, on the one hand to coordinate and appraise the operating divisions and to plan policy for the whole corporation, and on the other to assure a smooth product flow to the consumer and a steady use of plant, facilities and personnel in a fluctuating market. Each division's performance could be compared with another because costs and profits could be viewed against standard measures.” But the success of GM was also due in no small part to Sloan's appointment ‘of William S. Knudsen, a great production man, to Chevrole in 1922, the year after he left Ford in yee another of an interminable series of internal clashes.0 ‘THE CITY AS INNOVATIVE MILIEU Knudsen set out to make the Chevrole, then a relative failure, into @ competitor to the Model T. In his strong Danish accent he would urge dealers, ‘I vant vun for vun’.* Sales rose from about 300,000 in 1922 t0 over a million in 1927, moving ahead of Ford, The next year, Sloan became president and chief executive; Knudsen was already marked as the man who would eventually succeed him, Ford's period of innovation was over, and the brilliant team he hhad assembled ~ Couzens, Wills, Sorensen, Knudsen, Flanders, Avery, Lee ~ ‘was all gone, with the sole exception of Sorensen." By then, America itself had changed: the people who Ford imagined would buy his car, the people who bought i in their millions ~ the modest farmers, the new suburbanites now wanted something different. Nothing could compete ‘with the Model 'T on price and utility, but the Chevrolet could compete in looks = and did. A Ford executive later confessed that personal experience taught him that styling was a prime consideration in many women’s minds; and here Ford began to lose out. The Model T's success was its own undoing ‘unchanged and unchanging, it rode on into obsolescence. Meanwhile Sloan had invented instalment buying, the used car trade-in, the closed car, and the annual model, which trancformed the market in the 1920e and left Ford standing. By 1957, when Sloan retired to become chairman, General Motors had become the largest privately owned manufacturing enterprise in the world and Sloan had seen his management system become a model for all large industrial organ- izations, including ~ with ultimate irony ~ Ford itslf.”* Detroit as Innovative Milieu From this saga, several clear conclusions ean be deaven, ‘The first is that what mattered was not the development of « new product, the auromobile, bur the development of a new way of making it, mass assembly- line production, Ford is generally and rightly credited wich this achievement; yet he was no inventor in the sense that Whitney, Bell or the Wright Brothers ‘were inventors. Daimler and Benz had attached motors to tricycles and auto- mobiles in 1885-6, Levassor and Panhard had run automobiles in Pari in 1891 land the Duryea brothers of Springfield had operated their fist auto bugey; according, co their own testimony, in 1893; France had produced over 5000 cars bby 1900." Ford did not invent the motor, differential, electricals, steering wheel, universal joine, magneto, windshield, pneumatic tyre nor even planetary ‘transmission, all of which were in use by 1908. ‘What the Americans achieved was the mass production of automobility. As Tate as 1908, in the most integrated plant in Europe, Daimler produced fewer ‘han 1000 cars a year. Typically, French producers like Renault produced barely ‘one car per worker per year, and in Britain productivity was even lower, right down to World War I; luxury American producers did litle better. In 1912, an influential British trade journal commented thar ‘Ie is highly to the credit of ‘our English makers that ehey choose rather to maintain their reputation for high grade work chan cheapen that reputation by the use ofthe inferior material and workmanship they would be obliged to employ to compere with American ‘The Mass Production of Mobility cot manufacturers of cheap cars‘. Typically ewo-thirds of European car workers ‘were skilled, and therefore expensive. Ford, where in 1913 only 26 per cent were skilled, was producing twelve cars per worker per year, achieved by ‘Morris in Britain only in 1934.” The difference was that the European industry ‘was dominated by engineers who sought technical perfection at any price; the “Americans, in contrast, standardized design and then cut costs, aided by a ‘machine tool indusery far superior to the European one. The basic eason was that che Europeans thought the marker for cars was very small; Ford, and his competitors, had no such lack of ambition.” TE was pethaps almost inevitable that this revolution should have occurred in the United States eather than in Europe. For the United States provided uniquely favourable condicions: a large and expanding market, a high standard of living, ‘generous natural resources, a developed transportation system, a reservoir of capital and cechnical skill, and a high degree of mobility. On top of that, business leedership was uniquely forthcoming here, in the form of entrepreneurs ‘who grasped both the market potential of the mass-produced automobile, and the echnical means of realizing ie." “The second conclusion is thatthe mass-production revolution happened here because America in general, and Dereot in particular, had plenty of precedents ‘The two basic ingredients, machine tools permitting mass production of inzerchangeable parts, and line assembly, were borrowed from other industries and from long lines of continuous vechnological refinement, uniquely American, stretching back for decades. Even in the automobile industry, Ford's break- through only occurred after a decade of almost ceaseless experiment, much of it happening in and around Detroit; he learned from others’ mistakes. But ~ a third significane point ~ Ford also depended on an almost uniquely talented team of in-house engineers. All ehis underlines the basic point that Ford did not spring uniquely out of the Dertoit earth. He succeeded precisely because he belonged to an extremely wel-articulated neework. This supports Jobn E. Sawyer's argument that though Schumpeter’s spectacula individual entrepreneur, needless to say, will aways deserve observation and should by definition be conspicuous enough 10 get it soit is not just chrough the individual innovator that entrepreneurial “inputs affect the course and rate of economic growth, but through the attcudes, responses, habits and horizons of large numbers of les conspicuous decision- makers widely diffused eheough am economy, making the daily decisions which tend to sustain or akernatively to dampen che stimali coward cumulative ange.” ‘To mention the precedents is not to deny Ford’s achievement. He pot the parts cogether, produced a formuls, and pursued that formula ruthlessly. As his biographers have written iis success was founded on 2 clear perception of five sclared facts: that the [American people needed cars in millions; chat a single durable inexpensive model could meet that demand; chat when new technological elements werewa ‘THE CITY AS INNOVATIVE MILIEU. ‘woven together to create mass production, they could furnish the millions of cheap vehicles; that price reduction meant market expansion; and that high ‘wages meant high buying power. This was as obvious, when demonstrated, as Columbus's art of standing an egg, on end. Until then it was so far from clear that Ford had to batele his principal partner and ebe current manufacturing trend to prove it. A special kind of genius ies in seeing what everyone admits to be obvious ~ after the exceptional mind thinks of it; and Ford had that penis. Ie changed che world. ‘The question still must be: why did Ford arise where and when he did? He could have been born anywhere, and maybe could have succeeded anywhere; there was no inevitability thar pur his name and Devroit’s together. Yet there ‘was a strong probability. Detroit in the 1880s and 1890s was at the industrial Frontier Ie was not one ofthe great industrial cities of America, like New York, Philadelphia, Pitsburgh or Chicago. But nether was i at che edge of the world, I was growing very rapidly on che basis of the narural resources around it and of the industries that had sprung up to transform those resources into products, Te was thus a rich and varied engineering centre, and it specialized, above all, in producing transporcation equipment; it was one of America’s major railroad ‘cat manufacturers, The big firms subcontracted jobs to smaller ones, so there was a rich network of interdependencies and skills. ‘So, after serving his apprenticeship in the city’s engineering shops, Ford found that Detroit gave him three things: a ready supply of venture capital from ruling patrician families, eager to reinvest their gains from resource exploitation; a group of fellow-spiits, equally interested in the potential of the ‘motor car; and a network of contractors, who brought knowledge of products and processes. He could hear of the assembly line in Cincinnati slaughter- houses, only 270 miles to the south, or of the tradition of interchangeable parts used in the city’s engineering shops, for these had widely diffused out of New England by the 1880s. Without these, Ford could never have made his vision Above all, Detroit was still the centre of a rich farming region. Someone born a fatm boy, as Ford was, had a basic sympathy with the farmer and his needs, which no patrician could ever acquire: he understood rhe farmer's needs, to save labour, and to get his produce to town. He leaned heavily a first on the existing Detroit plutocracy. But he saw that, in their obsession with Iuxury products, they were on the wrong, track he ‘would go the poplar high road. He would have decided that nowhere else but ‘America, and pethaps owhere else bur Detroit at che rurn of the century. The ‘union of old, but not too old, money and young innovation proved irresistible; Detroit was a quintessential innovative milieu. 14 The Industrialization of Information SAN FRANGISCO/PALO ALTO/BERKELEY 1950-1990 editor of a microelectronics newsletter; but on the Rand McNally Atlas ie isthe Santa Clara Valley, a 40-mile by 10-mile strip running from Palo Ako to the southern suburbs of San Jose, at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Arca. It constitutes just over one-third of the 1312-square-mile Santa Clara County." In 1980 ig was the prune capital of America. It had only 800 manufacturing workers, half of them working in canneries and food processing plants ‘Today its frue trees have long gone. Its “the birthplace of pocket caleularors, video games, home computers, cordless telephones, laser technology, mic: roprocessors, and digital watches. Just about everything that’s new in electronics in recent years has come out of Silicon Valley? Ie is the ninth-largest manu- faccuring centre in the USA, with sales of over $40 billion annually, and with 40,000 new jobs a year during the eatly 1980s; it also has over 6000 Ph.D, che biggest concentration in the United States. Ar thar time it counted 2736 clectronics manufacturing firms and an estimated 3000 firms in service activites like marketing, advertising, public relations, selling, consulting, headhunting, supplying, R-and D, training, management, market research, design, venture capital, legal, and numerous other support services ~ plus at least another 2000 in other high-tech activities, a coral of 8000. The electronics firms are ‘extraordinarily small: 70 per cent have less than ten workers, 85 per cent have less than fifty? This, the newest major industrial centre in America, has inevitably seen ‘explosive urban growth. With a population of under 200,000 in 1940, in less than two decades it was transformed from an agricultural community into one of the fastest-growing urban centres in the United States. Inthe early 19508 2 few fledgling elecronics firms located here; by 1971, the area was already celebrated as Silicon Valley. The name was appropriate; for silicon, a chemical clement, isthe primary ingredient of che chips, or solid-state integrated cireuits, that provide the basic components of all che area's electronic products. On the basis of thar minuscule component, the county's population rose 121 per cent from 1950 to 1960 and another 66 per cent from 1960 to 1970; otal employment nearly doubled in the 1940s, and more than doubled in the 1950s, adding 60,000 manufacturing jobs in twenty years; and each manufacturing job generated two ‘or three additional jobs, epresenting a total of 400,000 new jobs in ewo decades. Somewhat amazingly, this dizzy rae of growth continued: from 1960 to 1975, T: world knows it as Silicon Valley, a name coined in 1971 by the