The “American Model” in Turin

Abstract

A black-and-white photograph from 1934 preserved in FIAT’s archives shows the company’s founder Giovanni Agnelli and Henry Ford standing outside a Detroit plant.¹ The two men appear dignified and self-confident, yet with a stern gaze befitting to the blighted prospects of the Depression era economy. At the time the joint portrait was taken, Agnelli and Ford were elderly men each heading two of the most powerful corporations in their respective countries. Most Americans who owned a car in the 1930s would have driven one manufactured in Detroit, most probably by Ford; by the same token, the majority of Italian car owners bought a FIAT. Agnelli had long been fascinated by Ford. He had first visited Detroit in 1906, and returned to the city again and again, modeling his two most productive Turinese plants on Ford’s flagship plants.² However, the Atlantic crossing was more frequently made by FIAT engineers eager to learn from and report on the rise of mass production in the Motor City. In 1919, when FIAT was still based on craftsmanship, a Turinese engineer was struck by the “well-organized shops” and “the intensity of the individual tasks” he found in the Michigan plants. Workers toiled as hard as if they were doing piecework—he noticed—but their effort was the result of “continuous and automatic production,” not of the incentive of a reward; “workers who are unsuitable, incapable, slow, or lazy cannot resist. They are automatically selected and removed from production.”³