Henry Ford’s "American Dream" Was Far More Disturbing Than the Legend

Henry Ford’s famous five-dollar wage could depend on what his investigators found inside your home. A worker’s savings, drinking, marriage, and household arrangements could affect the money in his pay envelope. This Henry Ford documentary follows the extraordinary industrial success of the Model T and the conditions behind the five-dollar day. From Highland Park and the moving assembly line to Ford’s Sociological Department, the Dearborn Independent, the Battle of the Overpass, and the struggle for union recognition, it examines how prosperity and control grew together inside one of America’s most influential companies. Where should an employer’s authority end? Share your view in the comments, and subscribe for more documentaries about industrial power and its human cost. A Ford car could carry a family away from the factory. The harder freedom concerned what happened before the journey, while the wage was being earned: the right to tell the man whose name was on the car that his judgment did not own the people who built it.