Tin Lizzie Dreams: Henry Ford and Antimodern American Culture, 1919-1942

Abstract

“Tin Lizzie Dreams: Henry Ford and Antimodern American Culture, 1919-1942” is an interdisciplinary cultural history combining close analyses of print and broadcast media, music and dance, technology, and built environments to argue that Henry Ford, one of the most popular modernizers in American history, actually espoused and popularized a personal philosophy that was distinctly antimodern. “Tin Lizzie Dreams” shows how Henry Ford’s cultural projects, most often discussed as a side item or supplement to his career as an automaker and industrialist, were in fact indicative of an essential antipathy and even resistance toward the modernity he was helping to create through the rise of the Ford Motor Company and Model T. With projects such as the renovation of the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and the practice of holding weekly “old fashioned dances” in Dearborn, Ford created a working antimodern philosophy related to that which T.J. Jackson Lears first traced among East Coast elites at the turn of the twentieth century. Ford then brought his anti-intellectual slant on antimodernism to a mass audience with the creation of the popular Edison Institute museum and Greenfield Village, opened in 1929, and the Ford Sunday Evening Hour radio show, which reached 10 million listeners a week at the height of its 1934-1942 broadcast run. The wider argument of “Tin Lizzie Dreams” is that antimodernism, as an American cultural phenomenon, was not only the purview of Gilded Age elites but also enjoyed broad popular appeal until the outbreak of World War II.