Ford v. GM , or birth of the office cubicle
Posted on November 22nd, 2008
by Scott McConnell |
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Reading Edmund Wilson’s diaries, “The Thirties”. EW’s notes from his visit to Ford in 1931, for an article that appeared in The New Republic. He’s talking to a Ford exec, who “ran down the Chevrolet people, Chevrolet being then Ford’s rival. Did we know what went on in the Chevrolet offices? They screwed the stenographers on the desks, whereas in the Ford offices everything was open and above board because they have glass partitions between the rooms and you can see what people do.”
Not sure it made it into the TNR piece.
Filed under: Culture, Uncategorized
“When the information came out, it was real news for the public and of high advertising value to the company.”
No, ha ha, that’s not about the Chevy stenographers’ essays in desktop pubishing *avant la lettre française*, but it is from Wilson’s 35-page article in question, “Detroit Motors”, which is available free, along with other great chunks of the FSG edition of his collection The American Earthquake,* at Google Books - in between “Communists and Cops” and “Red Cross and County Agent”:
http://tinyurl.com/5eo4a2
*The second section of which reproduces the whole of his 1932 book The American Jitters (England: devil Take the Hindmost), in which the Detroit piece from The New Republic was first reprinted in hardcover form.
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