In declaring himself the father of Detroit's working class, Roosevelt placed himself in a position long occupied by the industrial magnate Henry Ford, who had pioneered a paternalist mode of government predicated on high wages, working-class consumption, women's unpaid labour in the home, intense disciplinary surveillance of working-class households, and brutal suppression of industrial action. As president, Roosevelt's New Deal took over central planks of Henry Ford's model by combining welfare provision with racial segmentation and discrimination, a gendered division of labour, state paternalism and social pacification. He established a racialised compact that mediated the struggle between state, labour and business, and positioned a 'white working class' in jobs that were more secure and better paid than those of non-white workers.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 165