Ford Motor Company Introduces Five-Dollar Day
Poets involved
What happened
Henry Ford doubled assembly-line workers' wages to five dollars daily while reducing hours, aiming to reduce turnover and create consumer base capable of purchasing automobiles. This welfare-capitalist strategy linked productivity gains to worker consumption, anticipating Keynesian demand management decades before theoretical formulation. Fordism redefined industrial relations by treating employees as potential customers rather than mere production inputs.
Literary impact
Modernist poets like Carl Sandburg celebrated industrial workers' dignity and purchasing power in Chicago Poems, countering elitist dismissals of mass culture. Langston Hughes explored tensions between Fordist employment opportunities and persistent racial discrimination in African American communities. Consumer affluence enabled little magazine subscriptions and small press purchases that sustained experimental poetry outside mainstream publishing.
Source: Wikipedia
