“There is no reason why a prophet should not be an engineer instead of a preacher,” Henry Ford told William, “Big Bill,” Stidger, the evangelical firebrand and controversial media crusader, during an interview for Good Housekeeping in 1924. Like any good prophet, Ford proclaimed the extra of his being, assembling metaphysical surplus in the mechanics of his mass production. Published sources, material artifacts, and archival documents from Ford’s personal papers and Ford Motor Company’s business records show how the methods of Ford’s manufacture powered his popularity and machined a modernity this swaggering engineer incorporated in form and font. This presentation examines two modes of Ford’s endeavor to re-engineer time—as religious and as industrial. It describes Ford’s technical and organizational experiments with the assembly line, and it imagines how that machinery can be conceived of alongside Ford’s pronouncements about religious experience and reincarnation. Observing Ford’s religious idioms, sectarian preferences, and ritual forms, it suggests that Ford’s brand of scientific management and his principles of mass production cannot be fully understood without also considering his understanding of time as continuously ordered, materially measured, and laboriously manufactured through human incarnation and the metaphysical meeting of minds and machines.
