30 Friday, February 7, 1986
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Department of Michigan
PURELY COMMENTARY
JEWISH WAR VETERANS
OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BROTHERHOOD NIGHT
FEB. 18th, 1986, TUESDAY - .8:00 P.M.
Guest Speakers
BRIG. GENERAL CLAUDE DONOVAN
MR. RON W. IANNI
U.S.A.T.A.C.O.M,
Pres. University of Windsor
RABBI DAVID NELSON
MR. HY SHENKMAN
Beth Shalom Synagogue
Radio Commentator
MODERATOR — JACK SCHWARTZ, CO-CHAIRMAN
Refreshments — Admission Free — Public Invited
at — J.W.V. MEMORIAL HOME — 16990 W. 12 Mile Road
IRVING KELLER
559-5680
ELAINE LEVY
Dept. Commander
Aux. President
JACK BERMAN
Chief of Staff - Chairman
your advertising dollars do better in
THE JEWISH NEWS
Call Us Today! 354-6060
liwYour Vase or Mine?
A beautiful way to express your love this
Valentine's Day is with silk flowers. Bring
in a favorite vase or select one of
ours and our staff of experts will
create an arrangement just for
you. The perfect gift for home or
office... or choose from an
outstanding selection of unique
and unusual gift items they'll
always treasure. We have
something for everyone.
Complimentary gift wrapping.
Bring in this ad and receive an
additional 10% off your purchase of silk
flowers. Offer good thru February 14, 1986.
Fine furniture & accessories always 20% off.
8herwaud studios
Tel-Twelve Mall • 12 Mile & Telegraph, Southfield
Hours: Daily 10-9, Sunday 12-5 • 354-9060
Two Notables
Continued from Page 28
its invitation to Green; only
Bethel and Augustus Re-
ccord's First Unitarian kept
their original promise to ac-
cept speakers.
Niebuhr was lauded on the
floor of the convention and in
the editorial pages of Walter
Lippmann's New York World.
Rabbi Stephen Wise told the
delegates that Niebuhr was
one man "resolved that the
church shall not be chiefly
the Sunday club of the foes of
organized labor." World
editorialist James M. Cain
praised him for standing
firm. Other papers, including
the New York Times„ called
him for comments.
The most important lesson
Niebuhr drew from the con-
vention was not that the
Board of Commerce was
capable of intimidation, but
that the AFL itself was
hopelessly conservative. "The
idea that these AF of L lead-
ers are dangerous heretics is
itself a rather illuminatng
clue to the mind of Detroit,"
he wrote in his journal. "I
attended several sessions of
the convention and the men
impressed me as having
about the same amount of
daring and imagination as a
group of village bankers."
The delegates could think
of nothing but wages, hours;
anti-communism (they hooted
derision at Sherwood Eddy's
mildly favorable remarks
about the Soviet Union), and
the success of their own
organization.
In his Ford articles
Niebuhr registered his dis-
gust not just with deluded
magnates, but with bloated
labor unions. He granted that
the AFL was starting to
grasp the urgency of organiz-
ing on industry-wide lines, as
opposed to craft lines, but
argued it would go nowhere
until it transcended merely
material demands. It failed
"to fire the imagination of
workers so that they might
claim their birthright as
human personalities." It
swalloed Henry Ford's own
argument that workers ought
to pursue self-realization in
leisure, not work, and there-
fore clamored only for higher
pay and shorter hours. But
that course led directly to the
desturction of "personality,"
the loss of self-directed, au-
tonomous existence. "Even
an industry which grants all
that the workers might ask in
wages and hours and gives
them no share in determining
the conditions of their work
and no opportunity for the
exercise of personal initiative
is perilous to civilization."
On the question of labor and
Henry Ford it is also important
to note that Neibuhr "assaulted
Ford's humanitarian preten-
sions." For his articles in Chris-
tian Century Niebuhr was de-
scribed as an "an intrepid re-
bel." Then "It was hardly daring
(by the Fall of 1926-1927) to at-
tack Ford's heroic postures." Fox
states:
Had the pieces appeared in
the early twenties, when
Ford's image as the philan-
thropic five-dollar-a-day
Christian manufacturer was
still largely intact, their pub-
lication joy a Detroit minister
would have been an act of
courage. But in those years
Niebuhr, like the rest of the
Detroit clergy, considered the
Ford Motor Company a rela-
tively enlightened firm. Be-
tween 1915 and 1921, one of
their own peers, Dean
Samuel Marquis of the Epis-
copal Cathedral, personal
pastor and intimate friend of
Henry Ford, was the head of
Ford's welfare bureau. The
"Sociological Department,"as
it was called, was in part a
spy agency to regulate work-
ers' private lives, but it did
sometimes defend employees
— especially older men for
whom the ever faster assem-
bly line was a hardship —
against capricious dismissals.
As long as Marquis was in
charge of the Ford experi-
ment in welfare capitalism no
respectable Detroit pastor
would publicly second-guess
the company's
humanitarianism.
Niebuhr did express dis-
may in early 1923 over Ford's
"huge profits," but still ac-
cepted the myth that Ford
paid "big wages." That had
been true in 1914, but war-
time inflation and postwar
recession had reduced the
Ford worker's wage advan-
tage to almost nothing. Only
after Marquis resigned in a
dispute with another Ford
lieutenant and published a
critical book about his
former boss and parishioner
did liberals inside and out-
side the church take Ford on.
The New Republic and Nation
led the way. The Christian
Century followed with a series
of five short editorials be-
tween August, 1925, and
March, 1926 — pieces written
not by Niebuhr but by Hutch-
inson or Morrison. They were
the immediate inspiration for
Neibuhr's more substantial
attacks.
Niebuhr's articles tried to
puncture the "pretensions of
the world-famed Henry
Ford." By his standards they
were heavily researched,
since he had privileged ac-
cess to the unpublished find-
ings of his race committee on
wage rates in Ford plants. He
relentlessly documented the
falsity of Ford's- claim that
the reduction of the work
week in 1925 from six days to
five had resulted in wage in-
creases. He angrily noted
that during the previous year
"the average Ford man has
lost between $200 and $300."
Ford sped up the assembly
line, shortened the work
week, and produced as many
cars as he had before. Mean-
while his "highly paid public-
ity experts" cranked out the
news that he had "made his
workers a present of an extra
holiday each week:" Niebuhr