12 May 2009
 
The Buckingham Buckaroo

(Buckingham, November 1939)
 
I am a little peevish this morning. I am distracted by a breathtaking demonstration of how far we have fallen as an educated society. The fall has been so swift because the tumble is accelerated by astonishing technology.
 
If you want to get sidetracked and pissed-off, you can take the off-ramp right now. It is at http://www.storyofstuff.com and if you need something to get you moving before the caffeine kicks in, I guarantee it will help you out.
 
That is why I am peeved. I have a great story to finish, one the wraps Frances Freed, the ACCESS demonstrators, the American Fuhrer and the Ku Klux Klan all into a single integrated field theory that explains why the Buckingham Swim Club disappeared.
 
Many long-suffering readers will be relieved, no doubt, since the narrative weaves through the industrial revolution and the notion of what constitutes “work,” and h ow labor has changed.
 
Since the Buckingham neighborhood was born as a social experiment on a pastoral post-plantation economy, it is only fitting that the story should have one of its pivot-points in the communal washing rooms of the pleasant low brick buildings.
 
Affordable housing for the New Deal was the dream, enabled by streamlined construction methods based on Henry Ford’s assembly. Communal living in a pleasant park-like setting was a by-product of the important social end-state.
 
Henry Ford tried something similar, thinking he could build sensible neighborhoods for his workers, and control the entire environment of his people, at home and the office.
 
It did not work in Detroit, though you can still find some of the neighborhoods he constructed with that end in mind. Ford was a genius; no doubt about it. His innovative thinking did not stop at the loading dock. It went right to the dinner table.
 
His version of "welfare capitalism" was intended to reduce the high turnover that went along with the stultifying boring work on the assembly line. In the early years, he had to find three hundred works per year to keep one hundred positions manned on the line.
 
Ford announced his $5-per-day program on January 5, 1914, the same year Europe decided to commit suicide. The forty-hour workweek was not far behind, and the subsidized housing plan.
 
He thought globally, too. In order to reduce his dependence on British-controlled Malaysian rubber for tires, he bought a huge tract of land in the Amazon basin of Brazil to produce his own. Near the city of Santarem he established a self-contained city called “Fordlandia.”
 
It was a disaster. The land was unsuitable for the cultivation of rubber trees, and the local workers did not like the American-style housing, nor being fed American-style food like hamburgers.
 
As he did in Detroit, Ford established a well-resourced Social Department to enforce his ideas of good living. Workers had to wear company ID badges, labor through the traditional siesta time in the heat of the day, and smoking and drinking were forbidden even in the worker’s quarters.
 
You can imagine what happened. In 1930, there was a revolt, and Ford managers had to flee into the jungle until the Brazilian army arrived to restore order.
 
The Social Department in Detroit also folded because people bristled at the intrusive paternalism. Since the great cycle seems to be bringing us around to that again in our current situation, it is a cautionary tale, but there are plenty of those to go around.
 
Frances Freed practiced a little of the same paternalism here in Buckingham, and had standards of conduct for residents. The first revolt of the residents was described in the pages of the 1939 Buckingham Bulletin, the staid little newsletter produced by the residents.
 
The central incinerator was the problem, and the soot and odor that clung to the clothing when the trash was burned. Coupled with an increase in rents, a movement grew to cease payments until management fixed the problem.
 
Frances managed a quiet settlement. The Bulletin changed its name to the Buckingham Buckeroo the next year, with an entirely new swagger. With the flush of new money being pumped out by the government in Lend-Lease weapon production, the neighborhood was bulging with new residents.
 
There is a poignant ad for the meeting of a Peace Group in the August, 1941 issue.
 
But I digress. This was supposed to be about the impact of coin-operated washing machine and the communal laundry-rooms. But I will just have to get around to that tomorrow.
 
Oh, if you took the off-ramp to look at the video about “Stuff,” you will note that it starts off with the contention that the Government spends half of our tax dollars on the military. The irritating young woman goes on from there, and she is the one “teaching” your kids.
 
I did not get much further than that, but this is the sort of crap they are teaching the kids all over the country, a sort of Greenpeace stealth indoctrination that lurks under the radar for people who work for a living.
 
No wonder we are headed down the tubes. First you distort the history, then you can kill the truth.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com