Kati Curts's "Assembling Religion"

Kati Curts is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Sewanee: The University of the South.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Assembling Religion: The Ford Motor Company and the Transformation of Religion in America, with the following results:

Page 99 of Assembling Religion shuttles readers into an analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s English Traits (1856) as a harbinger of Ford’s white nationalism. It describes how:

In Emerson’s telling, the Anglo-Saxon in­heritors of England demonstrated “vigorous health” and “good feeding.” “They have more constitutional energy than any other people,” he wrote, and engaged in regular “manly exercises” as “the foundation of that el­evation of mind which gives one nature ascendant over another.” Such bold and brawny men, Emerson said, “box, run, shoot, ride, row, and sail from pole to pole” and “live jolly in the open air.”

Emerson’s theories of Saxon supremacy may seem an odd entry for a book about Ford Motor Company and its impact on religion in the twentieth century. In earlier pages I introduce more directly religious subjects, like Henry Ford’s techno-utopian understanding of machinery as “a new messiah” or how the Company institutionalized a social gospel. What a reader finds on page 99 is Emerson’s celebration of white masculinity, which he said was maintained through its “power of blood or race.” Ford found much to agree with in Emerson’s sentences, positing his own racialized theory of productive American manhood in a nation peopled with hearty frontiersmen of “pioneer blood.”

The Page 99 Test is thereby an apt entry into Assembling Religion. I include this analysis of Emerson between a description of Ford’s Americanization campaigns and an account of one of the first uses of the term “Fordism” (1926) by Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, a German economic historian who looked to Ford as exemplary of the kind of servant leader who would harken a “white socialism of pure, active conviction” (100). In the rest of the book, I delve into an extended analysis of Ford’s print and film productions and the industrial museum and historical village he built. In each, Ford promoted the pioneer as “a superior sort of man” for his spirit of adventure and innovation. A direct cipher for the Americans Ford most wanted to celebrate, the pioneer was cast as a character of right productivity, particularly in comparison to the “parasitic” specter of the “international Jew.” Never simply a nostalgia, the pioneer was a racialized imaginary that Ford said was “bred in the very fibers of our bodies.” (124)

If Emerson harkened the way, Ford mass produced its pioneering personification. What the Page 99 Test ultimately affords is a glimpse into the longer intellectual and relational histories upon which Ford manufactured and assembled his brand of racial capitalism.

Learn more about Assembling Religion at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue