David Halberstam Quote

Nothing in the period that followed was too good for the Rouge; it had the best blast furnaces, the best machine tools, the best metal labs, the best electrical systems, the most efficient efficiency experts. At its maturity in the mid-twenties, the Rouge dwarfed all other industrial complexes. It was a mile and a half long and three quarters of a mile wide. Its eleven hundred acres contained ninety-three buildings, twenty-three of them major. There were ninety-three miles of railroad track on it and twenty-seven miles of conveyor belts. Some seventy-five thousand men worked there, five thousand of them doing nothing but keeping it clean, using eighty-six tons of soap and wearing out five thousand mops each month. By the standards of the day the Rouge was, in fact, clean and quiet. Little was wasted. A British historian of the time, J. A. Spender, wrote of its systems: If absolute completeness and perfect adaptation of means to end justify the word, they are in their own way works of art. Dissatisfied with the supply and quality of the steel he was getting from the steel companies, Ford asked how much it would cost to build a steel plant within the Rouge. About $35 million, Sorensen told him. What are you waiting for? said Ford. Equally dissatisfied with both the availability and the quality of glass, he built a glass factory at the Rouge as well. The