Corporate Security at Ford Motor Company: From the Great War to the Cold War

Abstract

In the history of industrialization, few security challenges were as important or vexing to employers as labor discipline. Quaintly called ‘the labor question’ by Gilded Age and Progressive Era observers, employers’ need for a ready supply of workers and their desire to obtain maximum surplus value from them incited perpetual confrontation over wages, hours, working conditions, and productivity. Nowhere in the industrial world did this struggle play out more violently than in the US. A National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) report from 1936 (U.S. Senate, 1936: 71–77; NLRB, 1941) listed over 200 contemporary detective agencies engaged in industrial espionage and strikebreaking services, accounting for an estimated 10,000 ‘agents,’ not including the private ‘secret service systems’ maintained by many large industrial corporations (Weiss, 1986). Among the fiercest fighting occurred in the auto-making industry, where by 1937 employers spent millions of dollars annually on hundreds of thousands of spies, provocateurs, and strikebreakers, supported by munitions fit for serious warfare, including tear gas and Gatling guns (Huberman, 1937; U.S. Senate, 1937c, 1939c).

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