... of Automobiles... and Politics
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commentary by
Michael L. Bromley |
Bromleyisms
... of Automobiles
... and Politics
...and of history, of society, and a whole lot more.
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Automotive Book Reviews America Adopts the Automobile, 1895-1910
The automobile dominates modern life. Everybody has an opinion of it, everybody in some way depends upon it, and most Americans are downright fascinated by it -- even if they say they are not. Try it out on anyone, and you will find that behind every opinion, and especially, behind every dismissal of the automobile, is emotion. Be it anger, disgust, thrill or envy, passion drives thought when it comes to automobiles. As such, there's been way much written about automobiles and at the same time too little. As a science, and, especially, as academic curricula, automotive history suffers in that it is not large enough for its own department while being too large for the specialist. A look at the Henry Ford catalog shows how it goes: we go quickly from one and, only recently a second, general biography to all things Henry Ford this, that, and something else, and all of it in the minutiae. Automotive history is a study of slices. It has to begin somewhere. As stands, that somewhere is James J. Flink' s America Adopts the Automobile, 1895-1910, considered the classic statement on early automobiles and the development of the Motor Age. The automobile, wrote Flink on page two, was "the most significant force shaping the development of modern American civilization." Not a bad start, that, I suppose, and who but a good automobile denier would disagree? (Which would only confirm the statement.) Except this: Flink gets it wrong well before saying even that. He's wrong from the very beginning, or, rather, the very end of the very beginning, in his title: Why, Professor Flink, did you choose the year 1910? For Flink, that year marks when America finally "adopted" the automobile, an act he measures by social, economic, and technological forces that he saw by then had finally joined to form the Motor Age, marked especially -- and this is more the distinction he places on 1910 than anything else -- by Henry Ford and the Model T. While the T came about in late 1908, it was the opening of the high-capacity Ford factory at Highland Park on January 1, 1910 that Flink conceives as the end of the "formative stage" of the automobile and the beginning of the "Ford Age" (p 4). Once upon the T, the automobile was, for Flink, accepted, or, to use his word, "adopted" by America.* [* Note: That the Highland Park plant marks the beginning of "Fordism" and modern industrial order is today an orthodoxy. (See, for example, The Degradation of Work Revisited, by Stephen Meyer.) Like much of the Ford historiography, both for and against Ford and Fordism, this emphasis by far overshoots reality. The disease, born of Ford's own hyperventilations, manifested itself in the 1920s European left and right -- get this: both the pinko Gramsci and the nutjob Hitler were obsessed by the social implications of Fordism. From there, sad to say, there's not much a leap to modern academic hyperbole of Ford's importance.] Getting to 1910, that America would adopt the automobile was, for Flink, a given, inevitable:
Flink goes on to catalog the introduction of the automobile into the popular culture and mind, and he argues that it found little resistance. Drawing mostly from automotive magazines, and, although with less emphasis, from the upscale popular press (which sold to the same upscale demographic as the car mags), he catalogs society's views of and fascinations with the automobile, for and against, and mostly for. In his article Three Stages of American Automobile Consciousness, Flink expands his definitions into the 1920s and the Great Depression, for which he offers an explanatory cause in automobiles and the Coolidge economy. (More on that later.) As the premise, Flink reaches back to his book with the extrapolation that,
When I first read America Adopts The Automobile, I couldn't understand why Flink so ignored the role of politics in America's adoption of the machines. Reading "Three Stages" I get it. He thinks the automobile was a natural for the progressives. That is, politics didn't matter with automobiles because progressive politics already approved it. Flink never questions that it was otherwise. When he looks at politics, he sees no objection to automobiles. Chapter 4's "Institutional Response: Government and the Press" begins all wrong with the subtitle, "Government Apathy." Apathy? Apathy because that's the best Flink could say for the politics of the early automobile. It wasn't apathy. Apathy was the least of "progressive" governance's views towards the automobile. Where else is apathy excused, or discarded as innocently benign? Not in Jim Crow. Not in Nazi Germany. Not in injustice of any kind. Why, then, do we let it slide when it comes to the "most significant force shaping the development of modern American civilization"? Apathy. Flink notes:
Flink attributes it to federalism:
Leaving it at that, he goes on to catalog the half-assed motoring trials of the U.S. Army and the Postal Department, with not another word on why, exactly, did the automobile not make a true showing in those departments much less at the White House until after March 3 of 1909. Since Flink didn't ask the question, he entirely failed to make the connection as to why it was that it was the year of 1909 that America "adopted" the automobile, whereas in 1908 America was no closer to it than any time before, regardless of all those social, economic, and technological advance Flink says had evolved into the Motor Age. Flink fails to reconcile what he calls the progressive qualities of the automobile with progressivism's deliberate avoidance -- not apathy (active apathy?) -- of the technology. Here's the mistake: Flink assumes that the progressives were interested in automobiles. They had to be, he guesses, for automobiles offered a fix for the things that so concerned them, all those social blights of rural isolation, urban congestion, and associated evils. Flink catalogs how the automobile would and did shrink markets and towns for the isolated farmer, how it relieved horse-cluttered, horse-dirtied city streets, how it led to that greater nationality the progressives sought in adding, as the progressive Woodrow Wilson said in 1912, to "the intercourse between all the people." Wilson only said it in 1912 because of what happened in 1909. Without it, Wilson would have stuck to his old view, repeated in 1912 with the caveat of their usefulness for "intercourse," that automobiles were for "pleasure." Flink paid no attention to Wilson's 1906 views, which dominated the progressive understanding of the automobile, that it was a plaything for the rich that only created class envy and promoted socialism. Surely Flink knew of Wilson's speech, for those same automobile journals who convinced Flink of the usefulness and acceptability of the automobile to 1906 rather howled in pain at Wilson's remarks. Reading of cars in 1906 you can't miss it. Instead, we get Flink's list of the progressives' social demands and how the automobile met them. Those concerned with reform during this period had no use for the automobile. In fact, the automobile was perceived precisely as a challenge to the desired social order, and representative of all that was wrong in the prevailing order. Flink not only missed Woodrow Wilson of 1906, he missed the President of 1906 who was far more influential than Wilson. And that guy didn't like automobiles either. And everyone knew it. The man, Theodore Roosevelt, was the most influential of anti-automobilists. The full pack of progressives running behind him played along, and avoided automobiles just as strenuously as their president, and in total contrast to the joy for automobiles displayed by that President's reactionary enemies in the "Old Guard," the un-democratic Republican ruling class of Nelson Aldrich, Joe Cannon, and their like of hateful and supposedly backwards, reactionary "Standpatters." In 1908 Roosevelt commissioned a national report on "Farm Life," one to resolve this, to him, most dire issue of the day, one that deserved, he told Congress, it's own Executive Branch department. Experts went to work on "uplifting" the farmer, and reported back in early 1909 with all the problems and all the solutions, none of which included or mentioned once the world "automobile." This absence was neither a mistake nor an unintended overlook. To the Commission, as to the progressives, the automobile offered no solution for the farm. The automobile was not progress. Roosevelt heartily endorsed the trolley, and he dedicated primary attention to the railroads. He started the Panama Canal with the specific intention for it to compete with the transcontinental railroads. But motor cars? Flink can only have left it unmentioned because the great T.R.'s views on automobiles were not just in contrast to, but defeated all that natural good will Flink said brought us to 1910 and America's "adoption" of the automobile. Flink does not and can not account for Roosevelt. The great T.R., the great progressive, is inconsistent with Flink's natural adoption theory of the automobile. For Flink, the automobile just was, and it was on the way, no matter what. America was natural fodder for Flink's "automobility." Henry Ford's Highland Park opening in 1910 merely affirmed it. From the "Three Stages":
No matter how much automobilists believed in their technology, no matter how many doctors proved its indispensability (Flink's and the early autoists' favorite example of the social utility of the motor car), Flink explains the ultimate triumph of the automobile and nothing of its particular triumph. As I wrote in my book, William Howard Taft and the First Motoring Presidency, the automobile was going to arrive. The larger question was not just when, but how, and in what form. No, Professor Flink, it had not arrived by March 3, 1909. It only arrived the next day when the American President declared it so by example and word. It hadn't arrived before then because America's leaders deliberately avoided it. There was no compulsion to March 4 of 1909 and the automobile. The incoming President very well could have ignored or otherwise damned it. He didn't. He chose it. He affirmed it. He made it. Had that man not made it happen, Ford's new plant at Highland Park would have gone as short of expectations for the Model Ts as went his Model N of 1906, which didn't even reach half his projected numbers for that year. The problem for the Model N was not that it was not the Model T, but that it came in 1906. Just the same, the T's success was not that it was the Model T but that it came into full-scale production in 1909. (See the web slide show, The Motoring President.) The automobile was all that Flink says it was. But he mistakes the symptoms for the disease. While the automobile certainly matched core American values and ways, its appearance coincided with a period that rejected those values. That the automobile, as Flink writes, was "especially attractive to Americans because it did not involve collective political action," it did so in defiance of the progressive spirit and its political dominance, and not in conjunction with it. Progressivism was anti-individual, anti-automobile. Those democratic values that joined with automotive technology in the making of the Motor Age needed affirming. They didn't just happen by themselves, as Flink leaves it. Without affirmation, the American automobile would have remained as that of Europe, and what it was in America prior to 1909, the rich-man's toy. As of March 4, 1909, when Taft took the oath of office, the Motor Age had not yet begun. All -- well, many of - the pins were lined up, as Flink admirably describes, but political America was afraid and unwilling to take aim. Taft did. He applied those principles, those values that the automobile fulfilled, and he gave both to all Americans. Henry Ford's bright idea, which so failed him in 1906, found its moment. For it he must thank President Taft. Flink's dedication to the Progressive Era was such that he couldn't see past the progressives themselves. All he saw were progressives, so progressives meant everything to the object of his study. In "Three Stages" he offered his own theories of the meaning of the period, looking, of course, to the automobile to affirm it (see p 457, fn 14). It doesn't wash. All he had to do was to pick up that rock and look underneath. Instead, he stamped it "progressive," and left it as the marker of the Motor Age. Flink got it wrong. It's time now for a new beginning to the beginning of American automotive history.
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