In 1932, the Mexican artist Diego Rivera arrived in Detroit to paint the Garden Court of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The murals he did there show shadowy figures toiling by the fires of blast furnaces, men with their heads bowed at spiraling production lines, and others heaving trolleys laden with engine blocks. Rivera was inspired by the Ford Motor Company’s vast River Rouge Plant, which at its height covered over 1,000 acres and employed over 100,000 men. Fifteen miles of roads and a hundred miles of railroad track snaked in and out of the plant’s 93 buildings, which guzzled hundreds of millions of gallons of water from the Detroit River. Coal, iron ore, and limestone arrived at the plant’s docks to make steel. The metal was then rolled out and turned into parts for cars, which were assembled in a day.
It was a marvel of vertically integrated manufacturing and the greatest expression of Henry Ford’s philosophy of mass production and mass consumption. But for many of its workers, it was dehumanizing work. Ford liked to hire recent immigrants, as they were less likely to complain about their conditions. Rivera was a Marxist. His frescoes, immense, ominous, and admiring, capture the moral complexity of Fordism. The photographer and painter Charles Sheeler had a very different response to River Rouge. He was captivated by its geometry and efficiency, and painted it as if it were a quaint New England port, serene and stripped of human strain.
Among America’s greatest entrepreneurs, there are those whose achievements, however great, are difficult to grasp. What will ultimately be left of Bill Gates’s Microsoft or Larry Ellison’s Oracle besides the wealth they generated? Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is a financial concern, holding stock in companies whose hard assets were built and are controlled by others. There are great financial traders like George Soros, masters of capital flows; and technologists like Mark Zuckerberg who conjure clouds and streams of invisible connection. Then there are the titans who change our physical world: the Builders.
