1932 stutz dv 32 ralston victoria

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction. The Automobile, Its History and Influence, and Some Contradictions

1. Beginnings. From a Mechanical Curiosity to a Plaything for the Well- to-Do

2. The Inscrutable Henry Ford and the Rise of the Machine Age

3. The Rise of the Competion and the Consumer During the 1920s

4. From Out of the Mud to On the Open Road

5. Religion, Courtship, Sex, and Women Writers

6. The Interwar Years. The Great Depression, Aerodynamics, and Cars of the Olympian Age

7. World War II and the Reconversion Economy. No Time for Sergeants or Aspiring Automobile Manufacturers

8. The Golden Age of the Automobile. The 1950s in America

9. The Go-Go Years, 1959 to 1973

10. The Automobile World Upside Down, 1980s to the Present

Epilogue. The Automobile and One American Life

Chapter Notes

Select Bibliography

Index of Terms

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The Automobile and American Life

John Heitmann

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Heitmann, John Alfred. The automobile and American life / John A. Heitmann.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7864-4013-9

1. Automobile industry and trade—United States—History. 2. Automobile industry and trade—Social aspects—United States—History.

I. Title. HD9710.U52H39 2009

338.4'76292220973—dc22 2009001474

British Library cataloguing data are available

©2009 John A. Heitmann. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the

publisher.

Cover photograph ©2009 Classic Stock

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640

www.mcfarlandpub.com

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For Fred Schroth (1931–2007), who was the first to teach me about cars, and car culture.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people along the way were important to the completion of this study. During the summer of 2008, Peter Cajka, a former student of mine at the University of Dayton and now a graduate student at Marquette University, played a critical role in acquiring materials and in analysis. Peter exhibited considerable grace under pressure, and his efforts in exploring the topics of labor history and World War II were most significant. Niki Johnson, also a former student who is now an editor at the University of Dayton Research Institute, has done so much on this project over the years, beginning with a review of paper presentations and ending with a careful edit and reformatting of the manuscript for the publisher. Many students in my seminars taught me much over the years, including Elaine Berendsen, Caitlin Toner, Collin Delany, Maria Stanzak, and Greg Winters.

Student office assistant Rania Shakkour used her online and computer skills to help greatly in collecting a large number of historical images. My administrative assistant, Carolyn Ludwig, not only made numerous runs to the library, but also kept things going in the Alumni Chair in Humanities office when I had to sequester myself and write. Former colleague and friend Edward Garten not only supplied considerable information on his grandfather’s Ford dealership in Hinton, West Virginia, but also team-taught several auto history courses with me. Several of my colleagues in the history department at the University of Dayton were most supportive of my work, including Department Chair Julius Amin and Professor Marybeth Carlson, who encouraged me to follow my passion for automobile history and leave other studies behind. Professor Larry Schweikart, a former rock band drummer, made sure that I was up on a number of songs about cars. College of Arts and Sciences Dean Paul Benson not only provided funds, but also has been a constant source of encouragement. And finally, without folks in the Roesch Library —Robyn Reed, Bob Leach, and Diane Hoops—I never would have gotten the materials I needed to write the story that I did.

Outside of the University of Dayton community, a number of individuals also assisted me. My good friend Bill Leslie at Johns Hopkins University always believed in my ability to do good scholarship, and his Boss Kettering was one of the first serious scholarly works on auto history that I read. Further, it was his seminar on the automobile and American life that set me on my present course. At the National Automotive History Collection in Detroit, Mark Patrick and Barbara Thompson obtained the materials I asked for without delay. Jon Bill at the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum was a great help in obtaining photographs.

I doubt if I would have written this work if I had not purchased a worn-out 1971

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Porsche 911T Targa twelve years ago. Over time, it has become my “solid gold” Irish green Porsche, so to speak. I got plenty of help from my mechanic and friend Cliff Brockman. And while my wife Kaye has never “got it” that when you work on your car you work on yourself, I thank her for putting up with a seemingly quixotic quest to raise “Lazarus” from the dead.

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INTRODUCTION: THE AUTOMOBILE, ITS HISTORY AND INFLUENCE, AND SOME CONTRADICTIONS

I wonder if anybody has yet written a History of the Motor-Car. I am certain thousands must have written books more or less purporting this; I am also certain that most of them consist of advertisements for particular makes and models.—G. K. Chesterton, 1936.1

In an introduction to an undergraduate course syllabus, historian of technology Stewart W. Leslie said it well with the assertion that “the automobile is the perfect technological symbol of modern American culture, a tangible expression of our quest to level space, time and class, and a reflection of our restless mobility, social and otherwise.” To expand on that comment with the goal of writing a definitive and complete monograph is daunting to say the least. However, in this work that has emerged from my teaching undergraduate students, I plan to expand on Leslie’s comment and explore how the automobile transformed business, life on the farm and in the city, the nature and organization of work, the environment, leisure time, sexuality, and the arts. It might seem that my foci are rather obvious, given the overall topic. However, my experience has been that despite the passing of more than 70 years, G. K. Chesterton’s above-quoted comments ring true to this day. Many of the books on the history of the automobile that can be found in bookstores remain advertisements of sorts, sometimes focusing on a single marque, sometimes on a decade or an era, but whatever the case uncritical, simplistic, and superficial. Whatever the shortcomings of this study, I promise the reader a different kind of book. While there must be sections that develop historical literacy about the automobile in American life, there are also encounters with new material not to be found in the literature to date. I want the reader to think deeply about the car and American culture, as well as the transformative power of technology upon society and everyday life.2

The automobile and its related infrastructure transformed everyday life as well as our basic values. From top to bottom in American society, it created wealth and jobs. It played a crucial role in transforming Americans from producers of a limited number of goods to mass production manufacturers and consumers living in a Machine Age. It influenced, among other things, the nature and structure of the communities we live in, how we define and value community, and the design of our homes and other living spaces. Over the course of the twentieth century, the car whetted our appetite for new things conveying status and personal attractiveness, petroleum-based energy sources, engaging action movies, primal rock-and-roll music, and high-fat fast food.

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To characterize this complex transition is quite a challenge, but crucial in developing a general understanding of the very essence of what it means to be human in a technologically-centered Western society. Our loves, hopes, fears, ambitions, and disappointments are all somehow tied to the automobile.

While sitting at a dinner table several years ago during a Society of the History of Technology annual meeting in Dearborn, Michigan, I became engaged in an interesting conversation with a talented graduate student from Columbia University, soon to become a successful academic. The topic was writing a book to supplant James Flink’s well-regarded Automobile Age, which I had used for several years in undergraduate classes focusing on the history of car culture in America.3 The two of us concluded that it would be extremely difficult to take on this task, and that it would take at least 10 years to accomplish it, if it was possible at all.

Despite this well-meant warning, I began to collect materials for precisely such a project. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. After all, my students resisted reading Flink’s book, unless they were prodded by the big stick of a weekly quiz. Despite my encouragement and enthusiasm for the substance, insights, and synthesis contained in it, students disliked the extreme detail of this definitive text. Secondly, Automobile Age was becoming dated, as the automobile industry and its technology and organization were being transformed at light-speed pace, and a vast amount of scholarship on the topic had been generated since the late 1980s. In this emerging new world of alternative energy sources, rising petroleum costs, shifting centers and methods of production, and differing generational responses to the automobile, a vastly different car culture has emerged, quite a contrast to that of 30 years ago.

Finally, as I became more and more involved in automobile history as opposed to my former interests in the history of chemical technology, I increasingly wanted to say something new about the automobile in American life. One can say only so much about Henry Ford, mass production, Alfred Sloan and organization, design and designers, and the decline of Detroit’s Big Three. The literature on the history of the automobile is replete with well-worn topics. Thus, the challenge was to get underneath the surface, address new questions, and to dig deep into American society and culture. And to me, new and fresh perspectives were far riper for picking on cultural fronts rather than in more well-worn areas of economic, business, or technological history. It was culture—film, literature, music—along with social change that piqued my students’ interests, far more than lectures on businessmen and their strategies or refinements of engines and powertrains.

That is not to say those areas are no longer worth pursuing. Rather, culture and the social construction of technology may be a way to readdress these more familiar areas of scholarly endeavor.4 What follows, then, is the result of this quixotic quest to learn more about the world that I have lived in and the cars I have loved, hated,

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felt indifferent towards, and sometimes driven. I make no claims concerning completeness or closure; it is merely an exploration. In a sense, this work is my “auto-biography,” as in the process of researching and writing I have learned much about myself, the times I have lived in, and my country.

* * *

The automobile is an inanimate thing that many Americans have fallen in love with, and continue to love in a new world of microprocessors, laptops, digital cameras, cell phones, and flat screens. Despite the proliferation of similar looking “econoboxes,” a large proportion of Americans do not see the car as simply an appliance, like a toaster or refrigerator. Elegantly shaped and finely engineered cars are loved by many and admired by many more. Despite the constraints of aerodynamics and increased gasoline costs, contemporary cars can still be luscious objects, like the Dutch Darrin-designed Packards of the late 1930s.

Choices on the personal and societal level concerning the automobile have led to sweeping economic, psychological, and social changes, and perhaps there should be more awareness brought to this one thing, the car, and its impact on our lives. For many Americans living in the twentieth century and beyond, the automobile has become an idol to be worshipped, conferring power, freedom, and pleasures to its owners. In ignoring the warnings of the prophet Isaiah concerning idols, however, perhaps it has brought judgment on us as well, particularly at the time I am writing this work.

Fundamentally, we may wonder to what degree we are masters of this technology, and to what degree we are its slaves. If we are its slaves, we rarely recognize it. David Gartman, in his interesting yet stretched Marxist analysis of the automobile assembly line, asserted that line-workers were akin to slaves, but it takes little thought before one may challenge that bizarre claim.5 Indeed, there is little, if anything, in common between a nineteenth century African American working on a Louisiana sugar plantation and the auto worker putting parts on a 2008 Chevrolet Cobalt at the Lordstown, Ohio, GM factory. In general, work and life are often hard, but for a twenty-first century American, the possibilities for living the good life remain endless. For an Antebellum slave, to be someone’s property and to be legally restricted in movement and class says it all.

Since its introduction more than a century ago, the car has often been seen as a freedom machine—ask any American teenager with a newly issued license. With it, we can go and come as we please, and whether the monitor is a parent or a government, our whereabouts and behavior are difficult to follow. It is a catalyst for the making of a mobile society in terms of race, class, and geographical location.

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Yet, for most Americans, the automobile is also seen as an absolute necessity. For a senior citizen, the loss of driving privileges is staggering. For a working adult, access to the automobile is often critical to get to the job and back home.

This often commonplace, sometimes beautiful vehicle is a manufactured, mass- produced product that has displaced the horse, omnibus, railroad, bicycle, and trolley in the course of history, and has brought with it a remarkable sense of individuality and autonomy. Along with the inherent freedom that the automobile has brought, however, have come constraints, to the degree that we may thoughtfully ask whether the automobile has led human beings into a largely unrecognized dependency in which the machine now rules over us in subtle if not imperceptible ways. While we are not slaves to the car, certainly many of us have made choices involving it that in the long term may not have been in our best interests. Economically, it saddles many Americans with car payments while at the same time greatly depreciating in real value. The family car is a poor investment. Young people often work during high school to pay for their cars at the expense of studies. Furthermore, the automobile demands a highway network requiring extensive capital investment, one that cuts through city neighborhoods, thus dividing urban communities and often aesthetically reducing the city to one largely consisting of concrete and asphalt. Its concentration in cities has resulted in extended commuting times; its misuse by negligent or risk-taking drivers, along with product failures, has led to more than 40,000 highway deaths each year. And yet within hours of a fatal accident the scene is cleaned up to the point where it appears the accident never happened, thus obliterating negative impressions of how the machine can change lives forever. Only rarely do we see roadside memorials that remind us of those loved ones who are now gone due to a fatal accident. Would we as Americans put up with any other technology that took so many more lives per year than any war since 1945?

* * *

Indeed, like the tension between freedom and constraints, the automobile has resulted in a number of other puzzling contradictions. Car culture, with two very different Janus-like faces, is associated with inherent dichotomies concerning uniform goods and individuality, and public and private space.

To begin with, the automobile is far more than a means of transportation; it is manufactured in all kinds of sizes, shapes and colors so that people can choose that which is best suited to them and best expresses their status, lifestyle and personality.6 It is the job of the automotive stylist and the advertising people to induce those personal feelings inside of us, so that we cannot live without the car of our dreams. Cars are also one measure of our identities. They provide hints to the world concerning our values, aspirations, and our present-day economic situation.

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Who among us has not felt the effects of depersonalization born out of the bureaucracy of the modern age, with its reliance on badges, identification numbers and cards, form letters, blanket e-mails, and all the rest? And yet they are means for us to assert individuality within a hostile, competitive environment that wants to reduce us and make us faceless. Certainly our automobiles are one rather powerful means to make us feel more important than we really are. Yet they are made of interchangeable parts by largely interchangeable workers.

Styling is an important attribute of the automobile in a way that is certainly unique in American life. Thus, the car is an expression of our individuality; it is very much like fashionable clothing that moves. Once an accessory market developed in the wake of the uniformly produced and black Model T, cars could be changed to suit personal taste. Therefore, the common citizen could distinguish himself from others. Beginning in the mid–1920s, this trend was accelerated with the development of flexible mass production, so that the range of colors, engine and transmission options, and accessory choices seemed nearly limitless. For example, in 1965, the Chevrolet division of General Motors offered 46 models, 32 engines, 20 transmissions, 21 colors plus 9 two-tone options and more than 400 accessories.7 Designer cars and sport utility vehicles bearing the names Bill Blass and Eddie Bauer have taken this desire for individual expression to the next level. But it is more than simply style. A Hyundai Tiburon has a serious style to it. It is Brand as well. And the badge that represents that Brand has enormous significance.

The owner of a Mercedes possesses refined elegance. Similarly, a Lexus driver is a person who has wealth and often a sense of economic stability. Audi owners are well-off and like to think of themselves as a bit different. Can anyone behind the wheel of a Porsche be a loser?8

Brands must be protected by their manufacturers at all costs. A C-30 Volvo with a problem of unintended acceleration must be dealt with by the organization immediately and conclusively, for above all Volvos are equated with safety. Some would argue that the Depression-era decision to broaden the Packard market base beyond its elite niche to the middle classes might have temporarily saved the company, but in the long run weakened the Brand.

Psychologists have asserted that the colors of our vehicles tell much about the owners. Supposedly, cars are usually painted in bright colors and primary tones like yellows, light blues and reds during economic boom times. On the other hand, when the economy cools, so do the colors to include gray, brown, and dark blue. On one website the following is said about colors and who you are:

Black: First choice of ambitious drivers who want to project an image of success.

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Red: You’re outgoing and impulsive with a youthful attitude, but easily bored.

Silver: You have great style and are often successful, but tend to be pompous.

White: The first choice of doctors and drivers who are reliable and methodical.

Gray: Expresses understated good taste and indicates a safe, cautious driver.

Blue: A team player who’s sociable and friendly, yet lacks imagination.9

To further individualize our cars, in more recent times we have resorted to “identity bracelets,” or vanity car tags that allow us to get in a final word about ourselves. These vanity tags may be official state license plates or custom tags that are especially popular in states where only one tag is required on the rear of the automobile. Of course names are important, proper or otherwise, including: “Parrot Head,” “High Roller,” “Country Boy,” and “Pork Chop.” So too are religious inscriptions, like “Meet Me in Church on Sunday,” “Galatians 2:20,” “Happy Christians,” “Prayer Changes Things,” or the sign of the fish, a fish encircling the name of Darwin, or cross. Then there are business names, patriotic license plates, and names and inscriptions about sweethearts.10

We often have a relationship with this mass-produced machine, right or wrong, demented or healthy. As in a more primitive society where one has a relationship with animals where both partners profit from it—say, the North American Indians who once relied on the buffalo for their existence—we live in a largely urban, third wave industrialized post-modern society, where we identify and depend on the car.11 We repay it with a passion often bordering on obsession. It is that affinity, or love, that results in our naming these machines Lulu, Lazarus (because it was raised from the dead), Betsy, Bessie, Freddy, Nellie, Pumpkin, Little Willy, White Pony, and so on. We talk to these machines as if they have a mind of their own, pleading with them to go another mile in a violent rainstorm, or in extreme hot or cold temperatures. We also pray for them as we would for an afflicted relative, as we drive through a storm or sense a faltering motor as we drive down a lonely stretch of highway.

For my generation, and the two generations before it, the automobile was at the center of our family life. It was so important that many of my photographs that include my mother, father, relatives and me feature an automobile at the center. For a family whose fortunes were ravaged by the rise of Nazism and World War II, the progression of photos reflected our annual increased fortunes, as well as the well- dressed children who were growing up.

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If we think about it, this behavior of attachment to a thing is rather silly, but it is one reflection of an attachment to more than an object. One such relationship is mentioned in the thoughtful book Driving Obsession. It is the case of multimillionaire oil heiress Sandra West, who stipulated in her will that upon her death she be buried in a lace nightgown in her baby-blue 1964 Ferrari, with the seat comfortably slanted. In 1977, with West dead, her executor, eager to comply with instructions because only then would he inherit $5 million, precisely followed instructions and buried her in a 9-foot deep concrete tomb at the wheel of her beloved car.12 Communities also bury cars. In 1957, the citizens of Tulsa, Oklahoma, buried a 1957 Plymouth, using it as a 50-year time capsule. Oil, gasoline, and a case of Schlitz beer were put in the trunk, just in case these commodities would not be available in 2007.13 Unfortunately, 1957 Plymouths were prone to rust even without being buried, and thus when the car was unearthed during the summer of 2007 it was a near blob of iron oxide, although its elegant Virgil Exner–designed fins remained clearly recognizable.

For many Americans the automobile—the apex of twentieth century mass production technology—is also at the heart of an internal contradiction concerning individuality. Out of a drive for sameness and regularity, born on an assembly line so ably but comically depicted in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times or Ben Hamper’s Rivethead, we achieve the ultimate expression of self and personal freedom. At the extreme of expressions of individuality we have art cars. Harrod Blank, who wrote a book and made a video on the topic, has perhaps done more than anyone to publicize these very funny examples of artistic desire, like that of Volkswagen with a television mounted on top, a car covered with glued-on buttons, or a vehicle possessing scales imitative of a fish.14

Indeed, it can be said that cars are an art form, as Le Corbusier commented in 1928 when he claimed that the car was as powerful a symbol of the Machine Age as the Gothic Cathedral was of the Middle Ages. They can be very beautiful—or ugly— things, but whatever the case, we worshiped them at mid-twentieth century and for some, the obsession with them continues to this day.

Enhanced mobility brings with it not only the freedom to be a unique individual and associate with others of one’s choosing, but also isolation as well. Thus, we have a second important contradiction. Without doubt, the car has changed the nature of space and time, and with it human settlement patterns, social relations, and the spatial relationship between work and home and cities and industry. In the process of changing space, it has empowered people in many ways, most evidently women and teenagers, by enabling them to leave the confines of home. For many young people, it was a place for forbidden sexual activity. But along with this enhanced mobility came also an increased tendency towards social isolation, for the idea that the automobile is an extension of the home remains a central feature of car culture.

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Cars are parked in the home garage. It is a place no longer removed from the home proper like a shed, but rather integrally attached to the home and often a central design feature of it. So when we take to the road a part of our home goes with us, and indeed perhaps that is why agoraphobics (those who fear going outside the home) are usually quite content to go out in cars, but are terrified of using public transportation. Inside our cars we feel sheltered in a private place, so much so that people at a stop light pick their noses and put on makeup as if they were not observed. For the harried mother, driving alone is the one time during the day when she can re-establish her equilibrium.

There are undoubtedly many more inherent contradictions associated with the automobile and American life. But by focusing only on contradictions, one misses a full understanding of the role played by the automobile in shaping American life. What follows is the story of how the essence of life in America changed because of the widespread adoption of a complex machine. How those changes took place, in terms of key historical individuals and institutions, as well as how that change was represented in film, song, poetry and literature, is at the heart of what follows. In order to fully characterize this transition, a discussion of the history of automotive technology and its business and economic history, including organizations, markets, and consumer preferences, follows as well. Further, government is also a part of this story, as local, state, and federal authorities made public policy that created our roadways, often at the expense of mass transit, and regulated the auto in terms of safety, energy consumption, and the environment. It is also interesting to note that government is the largest single purchaser of automobiles, and this has been the case since the 1960s. The automobile and the nation-state is a topic that will be only cursorily addressed here, but one that demands further scholarly investigation.

To encapsulate all of these themes in a brief work is a daunting challenge, but one with extreme rewards, for with it comes an enhanced understanding of what it meant to be an American living in the twentieth century, and who we are as a people today in the early twenty-first century. With the future of the American automobile industry in flux, it may well be worth our time to revisit the past once again.

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BEGINNINGS: FROM A MECHANICAL CURIOSITY TO A PLAYTHING FOR THE WELL-TO-DO

Musicians, like poets, are often keen to comment on subtle changes that take place in everyday life. Frank Banta’s ragtime instrumental “Kareless Koon, an Ethiopian Two Step” was released in 1899. Unwittingly, perhaps, it was one of the first cultural representations of the automobile in America.1 The song’s sheet music cover depicts a wealthy and well-attired Black couple riding in a new electric vehicle driven by a White chauffer. Its occupants are shown throwing coins to a group largely comprised of White folks, in what was a total social reversal uncharacteristic of the age of Jim Crow.

It is doubtful, however, that the artist of this cover could have foreseen just how revolutionary the automobile would become, not only in terms of everyday life, but also in facilitating social change. The automobile would become a tremendous source of new wealth, and in the process elevate African Americans and Whites, but usually not to the extent projected on the cover. And while the automobile did not have its origins in America, it would transform her people and her land as no other technology during the twentieth century.

European by Birth, American by Adoption

An apt but worn-out cliché concerning the early history of the automobile is that “the automobile was European by birth, American by adoption.” Indeed, the visionary idea of t