He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest over the Industrial Order, and reported the following:Open the book up to page 99 and you witness Nikolai Osinskii, a Bolshevik economist who admired America, tangle with the higher-ups at the Soviet State Planning Agency about whether to include the automobile industry in the coming crash industrialization. The clash takes place in 1927, as the Soviet Union is gearing up to stomp a modern industry out of the ground. The planners argue that the Soviet Union should develop coal and steel first and consider “compet[ing] with Ford” fanciful; Osinskii cannot believe that the planners think a modern, American-style motor industry is dispensable. Page 99 reveals how mightily Bolsheviks struggled to copy America, and how they fought about the right way to do so even among themselves.Learn more about Forging Global Fordism at the Princeton University Press website.
So when it comes to Forging Global Fordism, Ford Madox Ford had it quite right: page 99 gives you a great sense of the book. In the book, Osinskii features alongside several other characters with improbable transatlantic biographies, whose activities reveal how American-style mass production moved into the era’s aggressive powers – the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Osinskii was one of Lenin’s economic advisors, traveled extensively by car through the United States in the 1920s (and wrote a book about it), presided over the nascent Soviet auto industry during the First Five-Year Plan, and was executed for his efforts by an ungrateful Stalin in 1938. On the Nazi side, learn about William Werner, an American born to German parents who worked as a machine tool engineer on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1920s. In the 1930s, Werner became an assiduous Nazi; he directed the leading German carmaker Auto-Union, supported rearmament, and during World War II acted as a “mass production enforcer” in the Nazi war machine. The Nazis liked him precisely because of his American credentials.
Osinskii’s row with the planners also reflects the book’s main theme: a whole cast of industrialists, engineers, intellectuals, and politicians – from Henry Ford to Adolf Hitler – disagreed radically about what the rise of the American automobile industry meant for society, economy, politics. Their clashes shaped how the industry took root across the world in the mid-20th century. The book will tell you that Ford’s own vision had more in common with 19th-century Midwestern populism than with 20th-century consumerism; that Antonio Gramsci’s famous ideas on Fordism were more telling of Soviet than of American realities; and that Hitler’s regime successfully courted and bullied the US car giants (Ford and General Motors) into serving its aims – all with lasting consequences for the postwar order.
--Marshal Zeringue
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