assembly-line

Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.

Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

Perfection seems sterile; it is final, no mystery in it; it's a product of an assembly line.

The world makes, and hates, bachelors.

Rivera__ admiration for Stalin was equaled only by his admiration for Henry Ford. By the 1920s and _30s, nearly every industrial country in Europe and Latin America, as well as the Soviet Union, had adopted Ford__ engineering and manufacturing methods: his highly efficient assembly line to increase production and reduce the cost of automobiles, so that the working class could at least afford to own a car; his total control over all the manufacturing and production processes by concentrating them all in one place, from the gathering of raw materials to orchestrating the final assembly; and his integration, training, and absolute control of the workforce. Kahn, the architect of Ford__ factories, subsequently constructed hundreds of factories on the model of the Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, which was the epicenter of Ford__ industrial acumen as well as a world-wide symbol of future technology. Such achievements led Rivera to regard Detroit__ industry as the means of transforming the proletariat to take the reins of economic production.