But my question was to what degree was that organic and what degree was it a marketing exercise on the part of Sloan in 1922.
Let us be clear what Ford did. Gasoline prices fell and he took practices that had been developed by Swift and Armour in the 1870s and implemented those practices in an auto industry that already existed. The Jungle was written about the meat packing industry for a reason. It seems strange to us, but Swift and Armour were the second and third largest corporations in the US in the 1910s after US Steel. Ford did not create "Fordism" the Chicago hog butchers did. He vertically integrated as US Steel had. Standard Oil and the meat packers did not. As for the Great Migration, the boll weevil and the mechanization of cotton picking played a pretty big role and Chicago, Philadelphia, DC, Baltimore, New York, Cleveland and Indianapolis ended up with a lot of Great Migraters. Ford's greatest original contribution was probably the invention of the charcoal bricket. My point was had Ford not been there at that moment someone else, perhaps less effectively, would have taken these ideas that all existed and were well known and put them together. The drilling and refining innovations were the important ones. Technologies are discovered, exist and are forgotten all of the time. Most of the great discoveries that we know all about are bogus. They are ideas that came and went multiple time until another technology happens to be present at the same time and in the same place. Falling energy prices made ideas practical that had never been practical before. The Ancient Romans had the steam engine. Kelly invented the Bessemer Process decades earlier. Multiple ancient or semi-ancient societies developed something pretty close to the Bessemer Process. Frasch's patent had almost expired when his process was made practical by falling energy prices. Ford DID NOT invent the assembly line. We know that he went to Chicago to inspect the slaughter houses as he was designing his assembly lines. He did not invent vertical integration. One significant difference is that US Steel actually remained intentionally inefficient to protect its sunk costs in facilities that were less efficient, so Ford may have been one of the first people to build an integrated operation as opposed to assembling one. I don't think that anyone claims that the Model T was the best car of its era. But other people were not designing cars to be mass produced for a mass market because in 1907 that was an utterly impractical thing to do. And honestly, the Model T was not that great by that standard either. Ford scaled up first and scale created cost savings, which drove down price, which lead to volume, which afforded even greater scale, which created more savings and so on. Maybe he was smarter than his competitors and recognized the new reality faster or was more ruthless in squeezing efficiency out of scale, but I still rank Swift and Armour well ahead of him as they were true innovators. BTW, the Model T was born on my birthday, so I've always had a great fascination with all of its creation mythology. When I was in college, I applied for a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant to write a book on this subject. They told me that I had to have a PhD in a Humanities field and be associated with a major university to have any chance of getting funding.
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