SOURCE: "The World As Ford Factory," in The Superfluous Man: Conservative Critics of American Culture, 1900-1945, Edited by Robert M. Crunden, University of Texas Press, 1977, pp. 81-4.

Davidson was one of the major figures in the Southern Agrarian literary and critical movement that started at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s and included writers such as John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren. The Agrarians were politically conservative and espoused the value of agricultural life and labor; consequently, they were highly critical of industrialization. In the following essay, he criticizes Ford's materialistic, mechanistic, and capitalistic ideals.

There is magnificence in this new book of Henry Ford's—this book of the splendid title, Moving Forward, which comes to us with the additional signature of Samuel Crowther as a kind of shrewd Boswellian collaborator. The title itself is a magnificent rebuke to Mr. Ford's fellow-industrialists, now wallowing sadly in the trough...